Word: mihailovich
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Darkness crept into the huge courtroom as the toneless voice (which once sang resonantly in the Serbian mountains) droned on & on. For the first time in six weeks the crowd of a thousand spectators ceased their hissing. They listened intently to Draja Mihailovich's last defense. He spoke with calm and sincerity, as if he knew that history would heed him even though Communist Tito's court would...
...rest of the world the truth was not so easy to distill out of the steaming cauldron of hatred, feuds and rivalries that was Yugoslavia when Hitler struck. To millions outside who remembered his early heroism, his rescue of U.S. and British flyers, it was hard to believe Mihailovich a traitor. What, then, was he guilty...
Conservative, Communist-hating Draja Mihailovich had been the one representative of the Serbian ruling class strong enough to fight back against Yugoslavia's Nazi invader. But when Hitler turned his guns against Soviet Russia, Josip Broz, the Communist toolmaker who called himself "Tito," appeared on the scene. To Mihailovich, the exiled government's official military leader, Tito may have seemed no more than a rabble-rouser leading a pack of bandits. Mihailovich clearly felt it his duty to unify Yugoslav resistance under his leadership and to hold his forces in readiness for the day when the Allies struck...
...approached for Allied invasion, Britain and the U.S. looked in vain to Mihailovich for a unified resistance. By 1944, wrote British former liaison officer Fitzroy MacLean last week, Tito "was carrying out a widespread and effective resistance to the Germans, and Mihailovich, however good his intentions, was not. In those days the military effectiveness of our allies was a far more important consideration than their political complexion...
When the U.S. and Britain threw their support to Tito, Mihailovich, too weak or too weary to control his subordinates, turned more & more toward collaboration. His major crime-unpardonable in war and politics-was failure. "Partisan troops," said Draja Mihailovich last week, "turned out better than I expected...