YUGOSLAVIA: Mihailovich Eclipsed

“They emerged like cats from everywhere, knives between their teeth. Flares did not frighten them. They broke into our right flank. Then the terrible thing happened that froze the blood of all of us. … Men, women and children flung themselves into the attack.”

Thus wrote a German war correspondent. He was not describing Allied Commandos, or even Russian guerrillas. He was talking about Yugoslavia’s Partisans, who, he added, “are not wild hordes, but strictly organized units which print their own newspapers in the forests and manufacture their own bombs and munitions.”

The emergence of the Partisans last week as the main anti-Axis force in the Balkans opened a new phase in the complicated, triangular Civil War that has alternately smoldered and flamed in Yugoslavia ever since the German invasion nearly two years ago. The Partisans had organized an army and a state; they were operating on a front 100 miles long and had already destroyed one Nazi Panzer column.

Mihailovich the Chetnilc. Misled by previous reports, many a U.S. citizen had come to identify General Draja Mihailovich and his Chetniks with the resistance of the peoples of Europe to Nazi invaders.* By last week it was clear that the Partisans had eclipsed Mihailovich. Axis military communiques referred consistently to the resistance of the Partisans, rarely mentioned Mihailovich. As might be expected, Axis propaganda described the Partisans as cutthroats, Communists and bandits. In London Yugoslav officials connected with the Government in exile used the same epithets.

In November 1941, General Mihailovich’s heterogeneous band suffered a serious defeat near Valjevo at the hands of German mechanized columns. The Chetnik Army splintered. Whole units under Mihailovich’s former subordinates, Gjayitch and Drenovich, joined the Italians. Others went back to their farms. Mihailovich himself retired to relative inactivity somewhere in Montenegro, avoiding action except for a sharp attack last June against a Partisan army fighting the Italians in southern Montenegro. Montenegrin Partisans charge that in certain instances Mihailovich collaborated with the Italians.

Nagy the Partisan. Those Chetniks who wanted to continue active resistance filtered through the lines and joined a Partisan band under the command of 32-year-old Kosta Nagy. Nagy was not an amateur. As commander of a Croat machine-gun battalion of Republican Spain’s International Brigade, Nagy had made a name by holding a position on the Ebro for weeks in spite of persistent attacks by Fascist units far better equipped.

The composite army under Nagy called itself the Partisans of Bosanska Krajina and became the largest and most active of half a dozen Partisan groups who fought steadily and bitterly against the Germans and Italians all through the year.

The Bosanska Krajina Partisans created a tiny state in the wedge-shaped area in Croatia bounded by the towns of Glamoch, Drvar, Petrovach, Kljuch and Donji Vakuf. They prepared systematically for major military operations. They trained their ever-growing armies, not for pinprick sabotage, but for a major campaign to drive the Axis from Yugoslavia.

They prepared politically by adopting democratic methods almost unprecedented in the Balkans. Town councils were elected by ballot. Medical services were instituted under the direction of famous Belgrade Professor Sima Miloshevich. Theaters were opened in the liberated territory, featuring well-known actors and the entire orchestra of the Zagreb National Theater, which had joined the Partisans. The new State had a Foreign Office, though only one foreign diplomat was present: Ivan Lebedyev, onetime counsellor of the Russian legation in Belgrade, who fled to Montenegro last year and is now Moscow’s liaison officer with the Partisans.

In the liberated areas Partisan money is circulated, and so strong is the influence of the new State among the Croat peasants that in certain areas east of Ljubjlana Italian occupation authorities cannot buy food with lire, but have to use bons issued by the Partisans. The liberated area has a radio station, audible in Switzerland, whose English-language newscasts come over in a sharp Yankee accent.

Slogan of the new State: “Freedom for All Peoples; Death to Fascism.” It advocates the creation of a federation of equal States modeled after Switzerland. The impoverished peasants of Yugoslavia—Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Hungarians, Christians and Moslems—have shown an increasing preference for the Partisans. They have deserted Mihailovich, who works for a greater Serbia, the Fascist Ustachi, who want a greater Croatia, and the Serbian collaborationists under the quisling General Milan Neditch.

Civil War. The day General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s Eighth Army began pounding Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in El Alamein, the Partisans of Bosanska Krajina moved northward down the jagged valleys of the Dinarian Alps to the outskirts of the Zagreb basin in Croatia. From the Valebit Mountains in Dalmatia a second force, called the Partisans of Lika, moved to meet them. From the northeast came a third army of Croat irregulars.

By the time Rommel’s lines were shattered, the three Partisan armies had joined forces, under a unified command, and re-christened themselves the “Army of National Liberation.” They organized the first continuous front in this irregular war—an arc about 100 miles long running from Slunj to Sitnica—and moved westward, sweeping one village after another from the surprised Germans and the Fascist Ustachi.

By last week, when the German occupation authorities realized what was happening, the new army had wrested a dozen towns and 50 villages from them, had advanced an even 50 miles into the Zagreb basin and created a solid liberated area a little larger than Connecticut.

New Government. Last week in the town of Bihatch, capital of the liberated area, 53 delegates from all over Yugoslavia met and elected as President of the Assembly Ivan Ribar, a Croat Catholic lawyer, member of the Serbo-Croat Democratic Party and son of the first President of the National Constitutional Assembly which met in 1918 to organize the State which became Yugoslavia.

This provisional government represented anti-Axis forces from all over the country and controlled an army estimated to be 200,000 to 300,000 strong. Neither the army nor the government is “Communist” or “bandit,” though some of the leaders, particularly in the army, are Communists. The National Liberation movement is mainly peasant in character, and includes many members of the Serbo-Croat Democratic Party and other peasant organizations—Croat, Serb and Slovene.

The first act of the provisional government was to send telegrams to President Roosevelt and Premiers Churchill and Stalin.

*Many a TIME reader nominated General Milhailovich for Man of the Year (TIME, Dec. 7).