YUGOSLAVIA IN WW II - GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE

 

King Peter and his ministers arrived in London in June 1941 to find themselves regarded as heroes. Their army's performance in April may have been lamentable, but that did not appear to have diminished Allied admiration for their March defiance of Hitler.

The fragmentary reports of ongoing resistance which filtered out of their homeland in July and August and, by September, of the self-proclaimed leadership of it by Colonel Draza (Dragoljub) Mihailovic, the foremost of the Serb royalist officers who called themselves Cetniks, enhanced their sense of being no mere collection of impotent exiles. They set about promoting Mihailovic's cause (and their own) among the Allies and made him a general. They also nourished hopes of using the thousand or so of their servicemen who had joined the British evacuation from Greece to Egypt as the nucleus of an army to be raised among Yugoslav emigrants in the Americas. With forces fighting both at home and in the Near East, they were confident of translating Allied pledges to restore Yugoslavia into reality.

 

It was not long, however, before divisions appeared in their ranks. These reflected both the unresolved national and constitutional questions which they had brought with them into exile and the weaknesses inherent in their detached and dependent existence.

King Peter, the fount of their legitimacy, was immature, impressionable, and wilful. His premier, general Simovic, was inept and inconsistent, and soon alienated both cabinet colleagues and the king. News of the Ustasas' massacres of Serbs in the NDH destroyed all trust between Serb and Croat ministers, and of both in their premier, who bungled his handling of this explosive issue. King Peter, meanwhile, had fallen under the influence of junior officers who resented Simovic's effort to monopolize credit for the 27 March coup, criticized his conduct of the April war, and accused him of failing to mobilize adequate aid for Mihailovic.

Despite British reservation, the king dismissed Simovic in December and entrusted his government to a distinguished but elderly Serb academic, Slobodan Jovanovic. In an effort to undo any consequent damage, the king and Jovanovic promoted Mihailovic again and made him their war minister. By this action the Yugoslav exiles entrusted their fate to a movement about which they knew little and over which they could exercise even less control.

The dangers of such a policy would not become apparent until August 1942, when the Soviets began to attack Mihailovic for collaborating with the Italians and, even worse, at the end of the year, when the British began to reassess their exclusive commitment to him.

In the first half of 1942, however, it was mutinies among the Yugoslav forces in Egypt which did the most to undermine the government's prestige. The displaced war minister, the senior officers, and the majority of their men refused to accept the new government's replacement commander. British GHO, regarding the mutineers as the true authors of the March putsch and the first officer sent out from London as incompetent, refused, in turn, to help the government impose its will. Only the nomination of another commander and Rommel's June eruption into Egypt put an end to this farce.

 

The inability of the Yugoslav exiles either to manage their own affairs or to assert their relevance to their compatriots at home by any means other than cleaving to Mihailovic's led their British hosts to treat them with ever-diminishing respect.

Their own efforts to lessen their dependence on the British by strengthening ties with the Americans, Soviets, and de Gaulle's Free French were unsuccessful.

Personal, party, and national dissension among them and the large Yugoslav-American community led to cabinet crises and, in the summer of 1943, two changes of government. These, however, had to do with King Peter's determination to defy his ministers' oppositions to a wartime marriage than with increasing British reservations about Mihailovic.

When, by August, the king contrived to provide himself with a non-party government under Bozidar Puric which was prepared to sanction his marriage, the British had come to see him not only as the sole element among the emigres worthy of their support, but also as the only one likely to repay it.

 

As the British moved towards abandoning the inactive Mihailovic in favour of the more warlike communist partisan leader, Tito, it was the king's legitimacy, pliability, and assumed popularity with the Serbs that appeared to offer the only chance of reconciling the UK's short-term military requirements with long-term political interests.

Having decided in December 1943 to break with Mihailovic, Churchil laboured to persuade Tito to work with the king. By doing so, he argued, Tito might acquire international recognition, the material assets of the exile government, and the support of the royalist Serbs. He worked simultaneously to compel Peter to dismiss the Puric government (and, with it, Mihailovic) and to name a premier willing to deal with Tito. By May 1944 he had succeeded.

Ivan Subasic, the former 'ban' (governor) of Croatia, formed a one-man government charged with effecting a merger between the monarchy and the revolution, and in June he signed an agreement with Tito's Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation (AVNOJ) which envisaged the eventual formation of a united Royal-AVNOJ government.

 

M.Wheeler,

Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995), pp.1295,1297