Word: mihailovich
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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...
Nothing that Mihailovich could say would wipe out abundant evidence that some of his Chetnik troops collaborated with the Germans. His tale was of how and why they came to do so, the tale of a victim and a failure, but not that of a traitor. He said...
...pitch dark when Mihailovich laid down his notes and wound up his four hour plea. "I wanted nothing for myself. The French revolution gave the world the rights of man and the Russian revolution also gave us something new, but I did not want to start today where they had started in 1917. I never wanted the old Yugoslavia. ... I was caught in a whirlpool of events. . . . Believing that the world would take the course of the Russian revolution I was caught by the [policy of] the Western democracies. They [the democracies] are for our peoples' good...
...Then Mihailovich spoke his epitaph: "I wanted much, I started much, but the gale of the world carried away me and my work...
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...