Thursday, November 16, 2006

General Draza Mihailovich a Brilliant Staff Officer and Man of Remarkable Natural Dignity

‘A man whom I am proud to have known; a man of honour; serious, well-informed, a good listener, articulate when he spoke, and I found him broad in his understanding, with loyalty
to the whole of Yugoslavia
and not to a narrow Serb hegemony.’


Sir Alexander Glen
British Naval Attache in Belgrade





GENERAL DRAZA MIHAILOVICH:

THE OFFICER AND THE MAN



By David Martin




Although Mihailovich was not widely known in the Western world at the time his country was invaded by the Nazis, he was very well known to a limited number of people concerned with the security of the Balkan countries.



Sir Alexander Glen, who served as British naval attaché in Belgrade before the German invasion, told me that he and Colonel Clark, head of the British military mission in Yugoslavia, had cultivated Mihailovich as one of the most promising junior officers in the Yugoslav army. Glen was obviously proud of his early friendship with Mihailovich, despite the fact that he had wound up as a liaison officer with Tito. Indeed, when I saw him at his home in Worcestershire, England in December 1977, he was still strongly pro-Tito in the sense that he felt that Tito had commanded a much more effective military force than Mihailovich, and that in terms of serving Britain’s immediate interests, Churchill had done the right thing in switching support to Tito. At the same time, however, it was obvious that he treasured the memory of the bright and dedicated young army officers he had known in Belgrade. About Mihailovich, Glen wrote to Nora Beloff:

‘A man whom I am proud to have known; a man of honour; serious, well-informed, a good listener, articulate when he spoke, and I found him broad in his understanding, with loyalty to the whole of Yugoslavia and not to a narrow Serb hegemony.’


Julian Amery had more to say about meetings involving “Sandy” Glen and Mihailovich. Shortly after the coup of March 27, Amery and Glen had invited Colonel Mihailovich to dinner ‘for the specific purpose of telling us something of his plans for fighting a guerrilla war if the Germans should overrun Yugoslavia.’ It was natural that they should do so, because Mihailovich was then chief of the Operations Bureau of the General Staff, and also a recognized expert on guerrilla warfare. In this second capacity they had met with him more than once to hear his views on Albania. Amery relates that ‘when we asked him [Mihailovich] how his plans for guerrilla warfare were going, he replied acidly that they all depended on fighting a regular campaign first. As things were going, the country seemed to be heading, not for resistance but for capitulation.

Mihailovich was also well known to important political elements in the Balkan countries. Dr. George M. Dimitrov, exiled leader of the Bulgarian Peasant Party, who knew Mihailovich well when he served as military attaché in Sofia, told me that he had received a highly favorable impression of this serious and farsighted young officer. Dimitrov’s one criticism of Mihailovich during this period—and it must be remembered that Dimitrov himself was considered the next thing to a Communist by right-wing Bulgarians—was that he was somewhat too naively sympathetic to Russia and to the Balkan Communists.


Transferred to a command in Slovenia shortly before the outbreak of the war, Mihailovich had used his position to scourge the Volksdeutsch and quisling organizations that, with Nazi encouragement, had become brazenly active. Even in advance of the war, therefore, Mihailovich commanded a certain notoriety among the Nazi elite concerned with Yugoslavia.


Although not an officer of high rank, he had established a considerable reputation as a theoretician by the time the war broke out. Mihailovich was never one to avoid taking controversial positions. He argued that large sums of money were being wasted on the fortification of the Slovenian frontier. He proposed a defensive plan that would have abandoned Slovenia and most of Croatia, with the Yugoslav army following back on redoubts in the mountainous areas of Bosnia and southwestern Serbia.


Mihailovich’s ability as a soldier was conceded even by his enemies. ‘Mihailovich…as is generally acknowledged, was a brilliant staff officer,’ said Michael Padev, a Bulgarian-American journalist who was pro-Tito at the time he wrote this in 1945 but finally turned violently anti-Communist and anti-Tito. Officers who had served under Mihailovich or with him all reported that he had an uncanny knowledge of the intricate topography of Yugoslavia. ‘He knew the mountains of Yugoslavia like he knows the inside of his pocket,’ aid one of them. ‘Even in making the most difficult journey he rarely consults a map.’


In the late summer of 1940, after the fall of France, Mihailovich demonstrated where his sympathies lay by attending a reception at the British embassy in Belgrade in full uniform, without obtaining permission. For this he was punished by General Nedic, who was then minister of war, with twenty-four days’ house arrest.


Before hoisting the flag of continued resistance on Ravna Gora, Mihailovich resisted the Germans with desperation. His motorized detachment was overwhelmed, losing all of its vehicles and most of its men. After the news of the Yugoslav capitulation was received on April 20, he made a fighting speech to some eighty of the men he still had around him, saying that he would not recognize the surrender, and that he intended to wage guerrilla warfare.


In the course of the war the available literature about Mihailovich was enormously enhanced by the media and by the hundreds of American airmen who lived with him for a period of months before their evacuation to safety in Italy. The accounts of the British and American officers who came to know him well had to wait until after the war.


One thing that impressed all who came to know him was his remarkable natural personal dignity, all the more impressive because it was combined with an unaffected peasant egalitarianism. He would have his meals sitting on the ground with Allied officers or American airmen or local peasants. On the march, he would always carry his own knapsack.


Lt. Colonel Robert H. McDowell, who headed up the U.S. intelligence mission to Mihailovich in the fall of 1944, was in Yugoslavia for only two months. However, during this period Mihailovich was retreating through western Bosnia, where his position was still strong, and on the many marches they made together and the many meals they shared and the many evenings they warmed themselves at the campfire, McDowell had more than ample opportunity to explore a wide range of subjects with Mihailovich and to get to know him on an intimate personal basis. It would be no exaggeration to say that by the time McDowell parted with Mihailovich, he had come to know him better than any other officer, British or American.


What was his impression of Mihailovich? McDowell summed him up as ‘a very fine gentleman’ – using the word ‘gentleman’ in a broad, inclusive Southern sense of a man who possessed all the basic virtues. McDowell told me that he considered Mihailovich one of the three most impressive personalities he had met during his long and highly active career, the other two being Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, and Father Sava Bozic, a venerable Orthodox priest who commanded a large Mihailovich formation in western Bosnia in which Serbs, Croats and Moslems served harmoniously together. This evaluation was all the more impressive coming from a man who was himself enormously impressive.


…On December 7, 1941, as the Germans were seeking to destroy the Mihailovich movement through Operation Mihailovich, Mihailovich was appointed brigadier general by King Peter [of Yugoslavia]. A month later, on January 11, 1942, he was appointed a full general and was named minister of the army, navy and air force.



David Martin
The Web of Disinformation
1990

________________________________________

Blog Author's Note: David Martin was and remains a foremost scholar on General Draza Mihailovich, authoring three books vital in providing an honest and fair historical analysis of the Mihailovich resistance movement, how Great Britain and America dealt with it, and the man himself: Ally Betrayed, Patriot or Traitor, and The Web of Disinformation. Martin's distinguished career included his roles as journalist, organizer of antitotalitarian and humanitarian causes, staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and political analyst as well as historian. He remained dedicated to the cause of illuminating the truth about Mihailovich until finally succumbing to Parkinson's disease in Arlington, Virginia.



Friday, November 03, 2006

The Mystery of Mihailovich: Patriot or Traitor?



“The tragedy of it all is not only that our betrayal of Mihailovich forfeited the friendship and esteem of the Serbs. By our pro-Communist propaganda we drove them into the arms of Tito. We succeeded in turning a large part of the population of Yugoslavia from friends into enemies, and reducing our prestige in the Balkans to zero. Have we not already smarted for it? Greek Communists have not hesitated to fire on British troops, Albanian Communists to fire on British ships, and Yugoslav Communists to shoot down American aircraft.”



Donovan Touche

London

December 27, 1946


General Mihailovich testifying at the communist trial in Belgrade, Yugoslavia

that would end in his execution in July of 1946.

NOTE from Blog Author: Ironically, even though it was Britain who betrayed General Mihailovich in the Second World War, it was some of Britian's officers, diplomats, and journalists who were fairest and most effective at pinning down and exposing the truth about what really happened in Yugoslavia during WWII and the British complicity in the consequences of what transpired during and after the war. A number of excellent and honest articles about the Mihailovich tragedy were published in independent British papers during and after his trial at the hands of Tito's Yugoslav communists in 1946. Of those, the following is one of the very best. Though written 60 years ago, it resonates today, like so much of what was written at that time, which should have served as a harbinger to those who would be in charge of world events and their consequences in the future.



THE MYSTERY OF MIHAILOVICH

By Donovan Touche

TRUTH

London

December 27, 1946


Was General Mihailovich a great patriot, foully done to death, or was he a collaborator? That is the mystery of Mihailovich. I would not have presumed to intervene in this delicate and disturbing debate but for the privilege of my acquaintance with a very gallant gentleman, Major Kenneth Greenlees, who for eighteen months served with General Mihailovich as British Liaison Officer until our Military Mission was withdrawn in 1944. What the soldier said is evidence in this case.


In the dark days of 1941 Mihailovich was the loyal friend and Ally of Great Britain. Then in June 1941, Germany attacked Russia, and the Communist Tito took to the hills. Tito was a Russian-trained revolutionary agent, and as head of the Communist party in Yugoslavia had opposed the war with Germany so long as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact held good. He now took up arms in the interest of Russia, although hitherto indifferent to the cause of Yugoslav independence. His intervention greatly complicated the problem of the patriot Mihailovich who now had not only to defend his country from the Germans but also from eventual communisation, especially after he became the recognized representative in the field of the Royal Yugoslav Government. The astute Tito quickly grasped that the Russians would be unable to provide any material assistance for some considerable time. He, accordingly, set himself to win the confidence and support of the British, and later the Americans. By getting their support transferred from Mihailovich to himself, Tito would bring about the overthrow both of Mihailovich and the King’s Government, which he upheld, and obtained the control of Yugoslavia for Russia. The Anglo-Americans would thus be induced to co-operate in the destruction of the very government which they had recognized. To achieve this he had to convince the British that his Partisans were causing far more harm to the Axis forces than were the Chetniks, and exaggerated bulletins were issued as to the Partisan exploits and claiming credit for those of the Chetniks.


The only reply Mihailovich could make to this was to increase his own action against the Germans, which entailed appalling reprisals upon the population out of all proportion to any possible value of his military action. He soon came to the conclusion that continuous small actions were more harmful to his people than helpful to the Allies. The meager scale of his supplies did not permit larger actions. As Minister of War and the King’s representative in the field, he could not discard his responsibility for the Serbian people, on whom he was wholly dependent for recruits, food, shelter, and information, or weaken their loyalty to the King by exposing them to useless massacre. Tito felt no such compunction, and, indeed, had everything to gain by provoking reprisals in his rival’s areas. Is not misery the seedbed of Communism anyway? The Germans were quick to seize the opportunity of sowing the seeds of civil war, and killed first hundreds, and finally thousands of innocent Serbs for any small act of sabotage. This policy was not nearly so marked in the Tito areas. To their eternal shame, the Anglo-Americans allowed themselves to be persuaded by the short-term military advantage of switching their supplies and propaganda support from Mihailovich to Tito, although this ensured the ultimate rulers of Yugoslavia being anti-British Communists. British arms and munitions were largely used against the Mihailovich forces which continued to rescue and evacuate hundreds of American airmen. The sacrifice of loyal and tried friends to their declared enemies has become a cardinal principal of British policy I these days of imperial decay; and who can say what craven motive of appeasing Russia calculated into the sordid calculation? Just so was the Polish Government, which we had likewise recognized, abandoned to the Communist wolves. Never again can any European King be expected to ally himself to a country which has proved as false and treacherous to its true friends in adversity as contemptible in its habitual appeasement of the strong.


General Mihailovich was a good enough soldier to have confidence in the final victory of the Allies, and as trustee for the King’s Government was in duty bound to weigh the advantages of any military action he could take against the reprisals it would bring down upon his people, and against the Communist threat embodied in Tito’s Partisan movement. As the Germans, in his view, would be driven out of Yugoslavia in the long run anyway, it is understandable that he should have regarded a permanent Communist subjugation as the greater danger to his King and Country, as in fact it has proved to be. The General’s plan was to organize his forces for a general uprising on the day of the Allied landing. It was difficult for him to understand why he should be called upon to sacrifice his men prematurely when every other resistance movement in Europe was being urged to lie low until Der Tag.


The followers of Mihailovich were for the most part Serbs and intensely pro-British, thanks to their memories of the Kaiser war, when the Serbian Army was re-equipped by and fought alongside the British Army. Old veterans of Salonika would tramp for miles over the mountains in any weather merely to shake the hand of a British officer. They would insist that British officers should share their homes, when discovery would entail their utter destruction, as it often did. The Communist intimates of Tito felt no sort of friendship for the representatives of ‘British Imperialism’ and only preserved appearances until such time as they had built themselves up with Anglo-American arms and supplies brought in at the cost of Anglo-American lives. All pretence of friendship was dropped once the Allies wished to land in Yugoslavia, when they found their entrance to the country practically banned.


The tragedy of it all is not only that our betrayal of Mihailovich forfeited the friendship and esteem of the Serbs. By our pro-Communist propaganda we drove them into the arms of Tito. We succeeded in turning a large part of the population of Yugoslavia from friends into enemies, and reducing our prestige in the Balkans to zero. Have we not already smarted for it? Greek Communists have not hesitated to fire on British troops, Albanian Communists to fire on British ships, and Yugoslav Communists to shoot down American aircraft.


The people of Yugoslavia, and, indeed, of the Balkans generally, are the natural friends of a Britain which can harbour no possible territorial ambitions at their expense and only desires their independence. With vain and pathetic eagerness they look to us for moral leadership. Their traditional friendship and respect is being destroyed at an ever-quickening temp by the continuous propaganda of their Communist Governments. This propaganda has for its theme the evils of a mythical British imperialism and the danger to world peace of British aggression. It is, in fact, rabidly British. Our remaining friends behind the iron curtain are never allowed to hear our answer to these absurd charges. They see, on the contrary, our Press excusing and justify their Communist regimes. What, indeed, are they to conclude when they read in the Titotalitarian Times of November 12, that the Yugoslav elections were, by Balkan standards, relatively free and “democratic”? The Times leader also appears to accept the view that the assistance rendered by the Soviet Union in the liberation of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria gives the Russians a claim to favorable commercial treatment, when such favorable commercial treatment means the barring of trade and intercourse between ourselves and these countries. The implied conclusion is that there is no alternative to the existing Communist regimes, and their overthrow could only result in an anti-Semitic Fascist counter-revolution. Rather than risk that, The Times evidently prefers anti-British regimes. Far from any moral support, those who look to the West for inspiration find only abdication and exhortations to submit to the Communist tyranny, any encouragement being reserved for the Communist tyrants. Doubtless this conclusion will be made known throughout Balkania and will deepen despair among our dwindling supporters.


In the opinion of Major Greenlees there is no mystery about Mihailovich, who was a great Serbian patriot and no traitor. The man who had always been a friend of Britain, and threw in his lot with the British when their fortunes were at their lowest ebb, was not likely to be guilty of collaborating with the hated enemy when the Allies were heading for certain victory. “It is not treachery to decline to accept a revolution.” The most responsible American newspapers have openly stated that Mihailovich was shamefully tortured before his trial. As to this, Major Greenlees comments that the aged and broken man who gave evidence at the trial was not the same Mihailovich he had known for eighteen months in the hills. No admissions that may have been wrung from him in these circumstances would be admitted as evidence in any British court of justice. The trial was just a frame-up to discredit Anglo-America in the eyes of the Yugoslav peoples. Major Greenlees asserts that every effort should be made to keep the Balkan peoples truthfully informed of British aims and policy, as was done during the German occupation. It certainly should, but the B.B.C., which delighted in creating the Great Tito Legend, is no fitting instrument for the purpose. Its voice would drown in the blood of Mihailovich. Imagine, in conclusion, what were the feelings of Major Greenlees and his brother officers when, living under the faithful care and protection of the Chetniks, they heard the B.B.C. daily attacking those same Chetniks and their leader !




Donovan Touche

London

Published in “TRUTH”

December 27, 1946