Partisan Boom

Last week the New York Times, with a front-page lead and two pages inside, recognized the Partisans of Yugoslavia (TIME, Dec. 14, 1942, et seq.). In Cairo, where Correspondent C. L. Sulzberger filed the epic dispatch, once-hostile British censors passed a flood of encomiums to the Partisans, to their commander, Marshal Josip Broz ("Tito"), and to a party of Partisan officers who had come to Egypt. One booster even spread the report that Marshal Broz's favorite books are War & Peace and Pickwick Papers.

The result: widespread recognition in the world's press that the Partisans are doing the fighting in Yugoslavia (estimated strength: 236,000 ill-equipped fighters, many of them women in 26 divisions). Cairo had almost nothing to say about Serb General Draja Mihailovich, who was once the hero of Yugoslavia and the favorite of British officialdom.

There could no longer be a question that Mihailovich and his Chetniks had pretty well dropped out of the fighting; there was much questioning about Mihailovich's attitude toward the Allies. But the eclipse of Mihailovich did not mean the eclipse of the Serbs: they form a sizable fraction of the Partisan armies, and in its proposed framework for a federation of seven Yugoslav states (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sanjak, Montenegro, Macedonia) the Partisan National Liberation Council has given the Serbs a predominant part.

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