The Forgotten 500 (19 page)

Vujnovich was back, and this time he was fighting the Nazis instead of running from them.

 

 

 

When Mirjana wrote him from
Washington to ask if he could help the airmen stranded in the hills of Yugoslavia, he immediately set out to determine if his wife really did know something that had eluded the OSS post in Bari. A little investigation revealed that no one had been informed of any group as large as the hundred airmen Mirjana referred to, but there was reason to think she might be right.

If it proved true, the revelation in Mirjana’s letter was surprising but not exactly shocking. It was entirely possible for so many airmen to be in Mihailovich’s territory without word getting to him in Bari. Vujnovich knew quite well how the military bureaucracy and politics, not to mention the Communist moles that had infiltrated the OSS, routinely got in the way of his agents doing their jobs. But how the news got to him didn’t matter as much as what he could do in response. He instantly felt a connection to the young men who just wanted to get out and go home. And he also felt a strong tie to the local Serbs helping them, any one of whom could be his own relative.

Not a man to stand aside and hope someone else acted, Vujnovich decided he had to get those men out of Yugoslavia. He knew the task would be challenging and he was not certain it could be done at all. But he was certain that it had to be tried and that the OSS was the right bunch of men for the job. While he tried to confirm Mirjana’s message, Vujnovich started looking into rescue options and quickly found out that the task would be challenging on many fronts, not the least of which was all the political maneuvering over the Balkans. Vujnovich knew that the political situation in Yugoslavia was growing more complicated by the day, and the interaction among the United States, Great Britain, Tito, and Mihailovich was becoming a tangled mess of alliances, pseudo-alliances, outright opposition, and conflicting loyalties. In just the past year, the relationship between the Allies and Mihailovich had taken a dramatic turn for the worse, which Vujnovich knew was the primary explanation for why the messages from Mihailovich about the downed airmen were not acted on. Sure, the situation on the ground was more complicated and more dangerous than when the OSS had gone into Yugoslavia in 1943 to bring out some pilots, but that didn’t explain all of the hesitation. Vujnovich knew that politicos were arguing back and forth about Tito and Mihailovich, juggling the reports from Yugoslavia—many of them questionable at best—to determine where the Allies should put their support. The facts about what was happening on the ground took a backseat to the political posturing and propaganda spewed by many parties with many different agendas. Vujnovich knew this and he knew that it would be as formidable a challenge for him as any Nazi trooper his agents might meet in Yugoslavia.

The first thing Vujnovich investigated was the reports from Mihailovich. When he looked into Mirjana’s comment about the downed airmen, it didn’t take long for him to confirm that Mihailovich had been sending detailed accounts of the airmen he was harboring. So why wasn’t anyone doing anything about it? The answer, Vujnovich discovered, was that Mihailovich was officially persona non grata with the Allies now. By the time Vujnovich started working on the rescue, the Allies’ position was that Mihailovich could not be trusted and should receive no support that might give him an advantage over his internal opponent, Tito. Or rather, that was mostly the British position and the Americans went along with it.

Vujnovich was no stranger to Yugoslav history and he was quite familiar with Mihailovich. This turnaround was shocking, though it fit into the pattern he was seeing within the OSS. There were so many Communists infiltrating the OSS and other military agencies, Vujnovich realized, that it was hard to trust any information disparaging an anti-Communist like Mihailovich. Especially one who had been such a loyal supporter of the Allies since the war began, and one who had been hailed as a great freedom fighter by the West.

Only two years earlier, a flattering, dramatically rendered portrait of Mihailovich graced the cover of
Time
magazine, leading readers to an article that described him as “the greatest guerilla fighter of Europe.” The first articles in the Western press had appeared in late 1941, a few months after the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in April and soon after the Yugoslav government in exile in London was able to make radio contact with the rebel general. The people of America and Great Britain were captivated by the romantic tales of this handsome guerilla who dared to stand up to the German invasion. The news from most other fronts in Europe was discouraging. German armies were advancing on Moscow and Leningrad, other countries had capitulated already, and resistance movements elsewhere were still fledgling. But the public was reading stories about this dashing general who refused to concede his country to the Nazis. The very idea that someone was fighting back gave people in the West reason to hope, and the press quickly realized that its readers couldn’t get enough of Mihailovich. Before long, Mihailovich was one of the better known and most popular public figures in the West, his name becoming synonymous with resistance and dedication to one’s country.
Time
magazine readers voted him Man of the Year.

The press reported on everything they could find about Mihailovich, painting a flattering portrait of a man who was at once intellectually gifted and possessed of a fierce fighting nature. He was of medium height, wiry, with blue eyes, horn-rimmed or wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and a look that reporters often described as pensive. Before the war, when he held positions in the Yugoslav government, Mihailovich was mostly clean shaven. During the war, he sported the bushy Old Testament beard common among the Serb peasants. In most photographs of Mihailovich, especially those taken before the war, it would be easy to mistake him for a university professor rather than one of the world’s foremost resistance fighters.

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: