Too Tired

"When I am too tired," said Draja Mihailovich, "I say yes."

Last week, in the stifling summer heat of a makeshift courtroom outside Belgrade, the onetime hero of Yugoslav resistance was very tired. Prison-pale and peering myopically through his thick-lensed glasses, he tried wearily to turn aside the charges of his Partisan accusers. Seven hours a day, for three days, fortified by a breakfast of rum and tea, the bushy-bearded Chetnik answered their hammering questions and returned to his cell for a dinner of ham & cabbage, topped off by tall schooners of beer. But neither rum nor beer nor the efforts of two of Yugoslavia's best defense lawyers could lift his pessimism. "I wish you wouldn't torture me with rhetoric," Mihailovich begged the court. "I am a soldier too weary to remember." Time & again all that he could say was "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."

For three days he sought refuge in scapegoats. He said his aides and subordinates, over whom he had had no control, had collaborated with the Nazis and received money from the Italians. "With Serbs it is not rare if every man carries out his own policy," said Mihailovich. But by the fourth day he was too tired. "You collaborated with the enemy. Is that right?" asked the prosecutor. Mihailovich hung his head and whispered, "Yes, that is right."

Good Intentions. A low, satisfied murmur swept the crowded, orderly courtroom. But for the 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 of?

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 at the Germans from outside the country. But Mihailovich failed to liquidate Tito, whose power waxed as the Serb's waned.

As the day 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."

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