The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Nevertheless, the agents’ reports cast doubt on Mihailovich as an ally to be trusted and played into the hands of British authorities who didn’t like the idea of the general supposedly twiddling his thumbs in the hills of Yugoslavia while Tito was out killing German troops and blowing up train depots. The British concerns were increased when British troops caused Hitler’s Afrika Korps to retreat in October 1942, and then Allied forces landed in North Africa less than a month later. Those events caused the Mediterranean to suddenly become a major theater of operations for the Allied and Axis forces, and the British thought it was imperative that German supply lines running through Yugoslavia be cut. When they looked at Tito and Mihailovich, they wanted to see active resistance and they told them so.

  Tito’s forces continued attacking German supply lines, but Mihailovich, though he was doing more than the British gave him credit for, did not increase activities in a way that satisfied the British. Authorities in Great Britain were growing increasingly frustrated because their first choice to support in the Yugoslav struggle had always been Mihailovich. They had no interest in seeing Tito establish a Communist government in Yugoslavia after the war. But as explained by author Kirk Ford Jr. in OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance:

  Obviously the bond of mutual self-interest which had for slightly more than two years held Mihailovich and the British together was beginning to unravel. As it did, the British had to choose between short-term military policy, which suggested the extension of military support to the Partisans, and long-term political interests, which implied continued support of Mihailovich.

  Despite doubts about his loyalty, the British—and by extension the Americans—continued to support Mihailovich as their ally in Yugoslavia. That support was sometimes only on the surface, as material support was given to Tito in amounts similar to what Mihailovich received. Neither received much. In the spring of 1943, however, Mihailovich was beginning to lose all support in London. Concerns had been mounting about Mihailovich being less willing to engage the Germans than Tito, and the accusations of collaboration had gained a foothold. A final straw came on February 28, 1943, when Mihailovich delivered a speech to a local gathering of supporters. In that address, an obviously frustrated and candid Mihailovich said the Serb people were now “completely friendless” and that the British were not willing to help then or in the future, and that, “The English are now fighting to the last Serb in Yugoslavia.” Continuing in his ill-advised rant, Mihailovich stated that his enemies were now the Partisans, Ustashe, the Moslems, and the Croats. When he had dealt with them, he said, he would turn his attention toward the Italians and Germans. He then stated, at least according to the British liaison who reported back to London, that he needed no further contact with the Western democracies whose “sole aim was to win the war at the expense of others.”

  Such accusations, and the apparent declaration that Mihailovich was breaking with the Allies, could not be ignored. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill fired off a stinging rebuke to Slobodan Jovanovich, the Yugoslav prime minister:

  I appreciate that words spoken in heat may not express a considered judgment, and that General Mihailovich may feel himself temporarily aggrieved of a small amount of assistance which it has unfortunately for reasons beyond the control of His Majesty’s Government been possible to send him recently. You will appreciate however, that His Majesty’s Government cannot ignore this outburst nor accept without explanation and without protest a policy so totally at variance with our own. They could never justify to the British public or to their own Allies their continued support for a movement, the leader of which does not scruple publicly to declare that their enemies are his allies—whether temporary or permanent is immaterial—and that his enemies are not the German and Italian invaders of his country, but his fellow Yugoslavs and chief among them men who at this very moment are fighting and giving their lives to free his country from the foreigners’ yoke.

  Churchill went on to conclude with a warning:

  You will, I am sure, appreciate that unless General Mihailovich is prepared to change his policy both towards the Italian enemy and towards his Yugoslav compatriots who are resisting the enemy, it may well prove necessary for His Majesty’s Government to revise their present policy of favouring General Mihailovich to the exclusion of the other resistance movements in Yugoslavia.

  The Yugoslav prime minister relayed the British concerns to Mihailovich with a sternly worded telegram that underscored how precarious the British support was and that words spoken in anger could be disastrous. But at the same time, he met with Churchill and explained that Mihailovich’s comments were made in a relaxed state to a small circle of his followers and were not representative of the general’s true feelings. “If there were a secret service to overhear what the Allies say about one another, much worse things would be heard than that speech by General Mihailovich,” he told Churchill.

  The warnings from Churchill and Jovanovich made an impression on Mihailovich. While he contended that his speech was greatly misunderstood and then interpreted with the most cynical preconceptions, he responded with a statement of unequivocal support for the Allies, reiterating that, “My only enemy is the Axis. I avoid battle with the Communists in the country and fight only when attacked.” He also stated that he had made every effort to stop the civil war in Yugoslavia, including repeated requests for the British to intervene with Tito, to no avail. He assured the British that he was ready “to do everything I can for the mutual cause.”

  The damage had been done. Mihailovich’s speech was just what the doubters in the British government needed to confirm that support should be thrown to Tito and withdrawn from Mihailovich. On June 1, 1943, the British Middle East Command sent a telegram to the Yugoslav prime minister detailing an “operational decision” concerning Mihailovich. “Execution is very urgent,” it said. The telegram, the contents of which were soon forwarded to Mihailovich, explained the British conclusions that Mihailovich’s forces did not represent a significant fighting force but the Communist Partisans did. The telegram instructed Mihailovich to go “immediately to Kopaonik with all his faithful officers and men; if necessary he is to force through with armed forces.” The British were instructing Mihailovich to go to Tito’s headquarters and submit to him, fighting through Germans and Italians to get there. The British position was influenced in part by reports from Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s son, who was at Tito’s headquarters as the principal British liaison to Tito. Vujnovich had heard from the American OSS agents working with the Partisans that Randolph Churchill was uniformly seen as a bad-tempered, spoiled rich boy with a serious drinking problem. Apparently his main function was to send reports directly from Tito to his father, mostly reports of the Partisans’ glorious victories over the Germans that the younger Churchill made no attempt to verify.

  Mihailovich responded with astonishment that the British would order him to surrender. He categorically refused, saying, “My fighters and I did not recognize the capitulation which the enemy imposed upon us and we certainly will not accept capitulation from our Allies.” His response only further enraged the British military leaders and politicians who had aligned against him. When Churchill met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Russian general secretary Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference on December 1, 1943, Mihailovich was one of the subjects of conversation. Churchill pushed the British view that Mihailovich could no longer be trusted to support the Allied cause, even though his own advisers were warning that Tito intended to establish a Communist government in Yugoslavia that would be controlled from Moscow. Churchill insisted that the war effort demanded a short-term focus and whatever happened after the war they would worry about later. He explained that his only goal at the moment was to find out “who was killing the most Germans and suggesting means by which we could help to kill more.” As Roosevelt already knew, Churchill vigorously opposed Communism except when Hitler was involved. A year and a half earlier, on June 22, 1941
, Churchill broadcast a message to the people of Great Britain explaining that the country was allying itself with Communist Russia, which had recently been invaded by Germany. When his private secretary remarked that Churchill previously had called Communism a menace he would like to “strangle in its cradle,” Churchill acknowledged the irony of the moment. But he replied that, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons!”

  Depending on the British assessment of Tito’s and Mihailovich’s activities in Yugoslavia, and not realizing how skewed that assessment was, Roosevelt reluctantly accepted Churchill’s argument. Before they left the meeting in Tehran, Iran, the big three had agreed that Mihailovich would receive no more support. Instead, the Allies would put all their efforts behind helping Tito win control of Yugoslavia.

  From that moment forward, Mihailovich was cut loose, fighting alone in Yugoslavia with no support from the British and even open animosity from old friends in Britain.

  Despite being abandoned, Mihailovich remained loyal to the Allied cause and particularly the American pilots who risked their lives flying over Yugoslavia to bomb the Ploesti oil fields. However, he continued to grow increasingly frustrated and disappointed by the actions—and inaction—of the British and Americans, especially now that the British had severed all ties. It soon became clear that not only was he not receiving any active support from the British (not that he had received much in the first place), but now he was being smeared by British radio. The Yugoslav general was enraged when he heard BBC radio broadcasts that extolled the anti-German efforts of the Communist Partisans while giving no credit to the work done by his own forces, sometimes even praising Tito for missions carried out by Mihailovich’s men. As the British sided with Tito over Mihailovich, the authorities constructed their radio propaganda accordingly. The BBC radio broadcasts were vital sources of information for the Yugoslav people, and the British voices were telling people that Tito and the Communists were fighting valiantly for them. Almost no mention was made of Mihailovich.

  This was the situation that Vujnovich found when he arrived at the Bari, Italy, office of the OSS and took over covert operations in Yugoslavia. He knew enough about the politics of the Balkans, and the influence of Communist moles in the American and British governments, to give Mihailovich the benefit of the doubt, but Vujnovich understood that the British were guiding the Allied position on Mihailovich. If they had decided that he was no longer a partner in the war, the Americans would go along with that. Besides, it was only recently that American operatives had any direct involvement with Mihailovich. Until 1943, the British had complete control over Yugoslavia as far as Allied operations were concerned, but the SOE and OSS agreed in July 1943 to allow limited OSS operations in Yugoslavia. The OSS was eager to get into Yugoslavia, seeing ample opportunity to fulfill its mission behind enemy lines and gain a foothold for operations in the Balkans after the war. The primary goal for the OSS in Yugoslavia was to slow down and interfere with the actions of as many German units as possible, to keep them from linking up with the twenty-six Nazi units already in Italy or redeploying to fight the Allied troops soon to land in Normandy.

  At the beginning of World War II the British were considered the worldwide masters of subterfuge and clandestine warfare, and the SOE had been established in 1940 by the Secret Intelligence Service for the specific purpose of assisting local rebels fighting the German invasion across Europe. So it was with great reluctance that the Brits allowed the Yanks onto their turf. Though the British and American intelligence units were supposed to be coequal when working together in the region, American OSS agents reported that their British counterparts always seemed to regard themselves as the senior partner, a little more than coequal with the Americans.

  Vujnovich knew from one of the key agents in Yugoslavia that the American and British forces did not always get along. They may have been Allies, but they weren’t always allies, agents reported from the field. Some OSS agents felt that the British were every bit their enemy as the Germans, at least when it came to their intelligence activities.

  Similar concerns were reported by George Musulin and George Wuchinich, OSS agents who had recently been sent into Yugoslavia. Arriving in May 1943, the two Americans of Yugoslav heritage were sent into Yugoslavia through Cairo, with the goal of establishing an OSS presence that would facilitate other missions. A round-faced, robust bear of a man, Musulin was a former steelworker with a personality as big as his girth. He had joined the army in 1941 and was assigned to the 29th Infantry Division at Fort Meade, Maryland. By July 1942, his Yugoslav background and his ease with the Serbo-Croat language, not to mention his eagerness to take on dangerous assignments, made him an excellent candidate for an OSS agent. While on infantry maneuvers in Virginia, Musulin was approached by an OSS representative who asked if he would volunteer for dangerous work behind the lines in the European theater. Musulin immediately accepted the offer and soon found himself in parachute training, made possible only by a special waiver that gave him a nearly one-hundred-pound exemption to the usual 185-pound limit for parachute jumps. The training officers marveled at the huge soldier’s willingness to jump, and each time he did, they made lighthearted bets about how many panels in his chute would blow out.

  When he was dropped into enemy territory in October 1943, this former star tackle on the University of Pittsburgh football team was the heaviest American soldier to make a successful parachute jump in World War II.

  After making his way to Mihailovich’s headquarters in 1943, during the period when the British were officially supporting Tito and Mihailovich in equal measures, Musulin reported to his superiors in Cairo that Mihailovich claimed to have 57,440 men mobilized and that he could mobilize more than four hundred thousand if he had arms for them. The American agent’s estimates of Mihailovich’s men was somewhat lower at thirty-five thousand, but he described the general as having “a fairly well-organized army.” However, he also reported that, “Mihailovich is now doing very little fighting against the Germans, although he did have a month of considerable activity after the Italian capitulation in September 1943.” Mihailovich’s forces appeared to have complete control over the mountainous region of Serbia, he reported, though he noted that the soldiers were remarkably lacking in military supplies. All of the arms were in “very poor condition,” he said, most of them old Yugoslav army rifles, and the guerillas seemed as dependent on mountaineers’ axes and knives strapped to their belts. Musulin saw many German machine pistols and Barettas in the hands of Chetnik fighters, along with the occasional light machine guns. Mortars and heavy machine guns were in especially short supply, and there were practically no artillery pieces at all. Worst of all, Musulin reported, was that there wasn’t enough ammunition even for the few old weapons the Chetniks had. “I would estimate each soldier has an average of about twenty-five to forty rounds per rifle, and one hundred fifty to two hundred rounds per machine gun,” he reported. He went on to say that the average Chetnik soldier “is extremely poorly clothed and has been living a hard, rugged, and miserable life for three years in the woods, suffering many hardships, living in dirty peasant huts, and eating what the peasant will give him. Many troops have not seen their families for nearly three years, or have lost them through German reprisals. Considering these factors, the morale and discipline of the troops in Serbia is good.”

  Musulin also noted that, “The Serbian people are tremendously enthusiastic for Americans. They refer to Americans as the only nation which has no ultimate designs on them.” They did not have such warm feelings for the British. Musulin described a complete distrust of the British by Mihailovich and his leaders “who feel the British have now sold them down the river to Stalin.”

  The American agent was not in any mood to defend the British SOE. Musulin also reported back to the OSS post in Cairo that the British sometimes obstructed his operations, apparently not out of any disloyalty to the Allied cause or any intere
st in collaborating with the enemy, but as a matter of protecting their turf and making sure the British authority in the region was not challenged. Vujnovich saw the same interference on his end. Sometimes the interference was overt and sometimes it amounted to simply a lack of cooperation and a disregard for the aims of the OSS missions. Intelligence might be restricted so as to exclude the Americans who could benefit from it, or messages might be passed along very slowly, eventually winding their way through the proper channels but with no urgency. The lack of cooperation, or outright interference, was even more pronounced when it came to operational missions in which the OSS needed to send agents behind enemy lines with specific objectives. These missions required great coordination and logistical challenges, and the Americans often had to rely on the British SOE because of its longer history in the region and more substantial infrastructure. In his short time in Bari already, Vujnovich had experienced the same frustration with the British that Musulin and the other agents in the field were complaining about. Missions that relied on British cooperation would be delayed over and over, critical supplies would not be dropped to agents and local guerillas, and perhaps most difficult of all, virtually all communications in and out of Yugoslavia had to go through British channels.

  Musulin also complained that the Chetniks—and the airmen they were hiding—were receiving virtually no material support. Having already seen the supplies delivered to Tito, Musulin was outraged at the lack of airdrops to the equally loyal—and some would say far more loyal—Mihailovich in the mountains. Why should the airmen harbored by Mihailovich get virtually no support from the Allies when airmen lucky enough to bail out in Tito’s territory could depend on a quick return to their Italian bases? Musulin became so enraged with the lack of supplies sent to Mihailovich that he sent an angry message to his OSS superiors in Cairo reminding them that, “We can’t fight Jerry with bare feet, brave hearts, and Radio London.”