Word: mihailovich
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Last week the new Office of War Information issued its first pamphlet: a detailed, bits-&-pieces account of underground resistance to Hitler in France, the Lowlands and the Balkans, by thousands of nameless patriots and by some known to the world, such as the Serbs' Mihailovich. Said Director Elmer Davis, summing up the message of The Unconquered Peoples: "When the time comes to create a second front it will be effectively supported as a front of liberation...
...Balkans the struggle of guerrillas against occupying Axis troops grew hotter as the weather cleared. From Yugoslavia's island of freedom (TIME, May 25) came news last week that General Draja Mihailovich's Army, now grown to a total of 200,000 men, had swooped down to attack Axis columns in Bosnia, then had retired again to craggy hideouts. In Croatia, deserters from Pavelich's Axis-puppet army were forming "Green Cadres" to harass the German. At Metkovich, Dalmatia, guerrillas derailed an Italian troop train, brought Italian casualties in Yugoslavia to a total...
...Nazi press has reviled Mihailovich's army as "rebels, Jews and Communists." Unquestionably they are rebels. Unquestionably some are Jews, some are Marxist Communists of one shade or another. Many more, probably, are Balkan "Communists," which usually means partisans of the country as against the city, the farmer as against the businessman. These people in general have Slavic, pro-Russian (Tsarist or Stalinist) leanings. The United Nations press has often referred to Mihailovich's forces as Chetniks -the name of a Serbian patriotic body which long fought guerrilla wars against Serbia's oppressors. Doubtless many are Chetniks...
Stories. Tales about Mihailovich, apocryphal or smuggled out of his mountains, abound in Yugoslav circles. It is said that he has done some of his own espionage, eating with German officers in a tavern where the host, devoted to him, was panicky with fright. Nazi officers are said to have driven up to a farmhouse where Mihailovich and friends were staying. When he had convinced the Nazis of his innocence, one of his friends remarked: "That was a close one." Mihailovich replied: "It was close for them, too." He pointed to a bush behind which a guerrilla machine-gun crew...
Today Draja Mihailovich seems legendary, but he is a legend with a big basis in fact: the fact that he has kept from five to ten Nazi divisions at a time fighting to conquer the country which they destroyed twelve long months...