The Forgotten 500 (20 page)

With each such incident, Mihailovich’s resolve grew and the picture became clearer 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.

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 with, “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:

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.

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
:

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: