Mihailović on Ravna Gora

On 13 May 1941, less than a month after the capitulation of the Yugoslav army, a small band of exhausted soldiers reached Ravna Gora, a wooded plateau on the slopes of Mount Suvobor in western Serbia. They were led by a 48-year-old General Staff colonel, Dragoljub Mihailović, known as Draža, an officer who in mid-April had refused to lay down his arms and with a handful of men had fought his way from northern Bosnia across the Drina into German-occupied Serbia. Of the roughly eighty men who had crossed the river with him at the end of April, there remained, according to the historian Jozo Tomasevich, seven officers and twenty-four NCOs and other ranks. On Ravna Gora they set up camp and named their group the Command of Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army. From this seed grew the Chetnik movement, one of the two great forces that for the next four years fought the occupiers in Yugoslavia – and each other.

The date of 13 May comes from the tradition of the movement itself, which later celebrated it as its anniversary, and most studies accept it. Some Serbian literature gives 11 May, while Tomasevich cautiously speaks of “the beginning of May”. It is often written that Mihailović then created the “Yugoslav Army in the Homeland”, made up chiefly of Serbs but also of Slovenes, Bosniaks and Croats, and called for a rising. That is a simplification. The name Yugoslav Army in the Homeland (Jugoslovenska vojska u otadžbini) first appeared in BBC broadcasts only in the autumn of 1941, and became official at the turn of 1941 and 1942, when the government-in-exile made Mihailović its minister of war. The Ravna Gora group was almost exclusively Serbian. Nor was there any call for a rising in May: from the very beginning Mihailović believed that it was too early for open struggle.

The officer who foresaw defeat

Mihailović was no ordinary officer. Born in 1893 in Ivanjica in western Serbia, he fought as a cadet in both Balkan Wars and went through the Albanian Golgotha – the retreat of the Serbian army in the winter of 1915 – and the Salonika front. In the inter-war army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia he made a staff career, served as military attaché in Sofia and Prague, and then lectured at the military academy. In the late 1930s he submitted a memorandum to his superiors arguing that the Yugoslav army would be unable to defend the long northern frontiers. He proposed that in the event of war the army should withdraw into the mountains of the interior, that units be organised on a national basis, and that light, mobile Chetnik detachments be formed for irregular warfare behind enemy lines. For this the minister of war, General Milan Nedić, punished him with arrest. He was placed under arrest a second time in 1940, when at a reception at the British legation he spoke out against the Germans too openly and the Reich’s envoy protested.

When Germany attacked Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, Mihailović was serving on the staff of the 2nd Army in Bosnia – according to most sources as deputy chief of staff, according to Serbian ones as head of the operations section. In the chaos of the retreat, as the Germans broke through the front on the Sava and in Bosnia and Slavonia the Ustaše disarmed Yugoslav units in the name of the newly proclaimed Independent State of Croatia, on 13 April he took command of an improvised “rapid detachment” in the area of Doboj. Two days later word reached him that the Supreme Command had requested an armistice. Mihailović did not obey. With a few dozen volunteers, almost all of them Serbs, he took to the mountains.

The march through Bosnia

The plan was simple: to reach the mountainous interior of Serbia and join up with the units that, he believed, were still fighting somewhere. The group marched south-east through eastern Bosnia, across territory that formally already belonged to the Ustaša state. Stray soldiers and officers joined it; the disheartened drifted away. On the way there were skirmishes with the Ustaše and with Muslim self-defence units, and according to some accounts with the Germans as well. Around 29 April, by which time the foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano had already carved up Yugoslavia in Vienna, Mihailović and some eighty men crossed the Drina into Serbia.

It turned out that there was no fighting army there. The Germans had placed rump Serbia under military administration and on 30 April attached to it a compliant Council of Commissioners headed by the former interior minister Milan Aćimović. Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav soldiers, most of them Serbs, had been taken prisoner. From the very first days the occupier also showed what resistance would cost: in April at Pančevo in the Banat, in reprisal for the shooting of one of their soldiers, the Germans hanged and shot several dozen civilians. Mihailović’s group dwindled. By the time it reached the area of Valjevo and Gornji Milanovac at the beginning of May, it numbered a few dozen men.

The camp on Ravna Gora

Ravna Gora, a flat, wooded height in the Suvobor massif between Valjevo and Gornji Milanovac, was an ideal hiding place. It lay far from the main roads and railways, the Germans scarcely ever went there, and the local administration and gendarmerie carried on working, often quietly sympathising with officers who had not laid down their arms. Suvobor was a symbolic place in Serbia: it was from here, in December 1914, that the Serbian army had launched its victorious counter-offensive against Austria-Hungary in the Battle of the Kolubara.

On arrival Mihailović discovered that his group was the only one. No one else in Serbia was offering organised resistance. He therefore named his camp the Command of Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army (Komanda četničkih odreda Jugoslovenske vojske) and began building an organisation from scratch. The reference to the Chetniks was no accident. The name had been borne by the Serbian guerrillas who fought the Turks in Macedonia before 1912 and by volunteer detachments in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. Between the wars there were Chetnik veterans’ associations, and in 1940 the army even created a special Chetnik Command for irregular warfare. The Ravna Gora group, however, had no formal link with these organisations. The best-known pre-war Chetnik leader, Vojvoda Kosta Pećanac, came to terms with the Germans and the collaborationist authorities in Belgrade in the summer of 1941. For that reason Mihailović’s men, to distinguish themselves from Pećanac’s Chetniks, called themselves the “Ravna Gora movement” (ravnogorski pokret).

The first weeks were taken up with organisational work rather than fighting. Mihailović made contact with officers who had escaped captivity and were hiding in the villages, set up an intelligence and courier network, and won over village headmen and gendarmes. With their help he drew up lists of reservists and conscripts whom he intended to call to arms when the moment came. Civilians also came to the camp, chiefly intellectuals from the Serbian Cultural Club – the lawyer Dragiša Vasić and the jurist Stevan Moljević – who took charge of propaganda and soon of the movement’s political programme as well. The aim was to liberate the country from German and Italian occupation and from Ustaša rule, and to restore Yugoslavia under King Peter II, whose government under General Dušan Simović was then in the Middle East, on its way to London. Mihailović as yet had no contact with that government. The first courier from Ravna Gora reached Istanbul only on 19 June, and radio contact with the British and the government-in-exile was established in September 1941.

A strategy of waiting

From the first days Mihailović had a clear concept and he held to it throughout the war. He believed that the war would be long, that it would be decided outside the Balkans, and that the Serbs – who in the First World War had lost, by various estimates, between a sixth and a quarter of their population, and who were now being massacred by the Ustaše in Croatia and Bosnia – could not afford a premature rising. The Germans answered every attack with mass executions of hostages, and a handful of poorly armed men could not defend the villages against them. The task was therefore to build a secret army, keep it hidden, and strike only when the Allies landed in the Balkans or the Germans began to falter. Until then intelligence work, quiet sabotage and the defence of Serbs against the Ustaše were permitted.

This concept, typical of professional officers in many occupied countries of Europe, was sensible in May 1941 and consistent with the British line, which likewise did not want resistance movements to be wiped out in premature outbreaks. But it had weaknesses that emerged later: it ceded the initiative to those who wanted to fight at once, and in the longer run it encouraged the search for local arrangements with the occupier, simply to survive until the day of decision. Mihailović made his first public appearance only on 28 June, at a village church fair at Tometino Polje. He told the assembled peasants that preparations for the struggle were under way, but that its hour had not yet come.

The Communists wait for a signal from Moscow

It is also pointed out that at this time Josip Broz Tito and the Yugoslav Partisans were tied to the Soviet Union, which still maintained friendly relations with Germany. In broad outline that is true, but in May 1941 there were as yet no Partisans. What did exist was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), illegal since 1921, with some eight thousand members and a far larger youth organisation – disciplined and accustomed to clandestine work. Since 1937 it had been led by Tito, a faithful executor of the line of the Communist International. Since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that line had portrayed the war as a clash of imperialists in which Communists should take neither side. Moscow, moreover, was quick to accept the new order in the Balkans. As late as 5 April, on the eve of the German attack, it had signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression with Simović’s government, yet by the beginning of May it had ceased to recognise the Yugoslav envoy in Moscow, Milan Gavrilović, as the representative of an existing state.

The KPJ was not idle, however. In April it called for the defence of the country, and in the first days of May, at a meeting of the leadership in Zagreb, it resolved to prepare for armed struggle: to collect weapons, form military committees and train men. On 13 May – the very day Mihailović reached Ravna Gora – Tito sent the Comintern a report that the Yugoslav Communists were preparing a rising that would break out when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. At the end of May the party leadership moved to Belgrade. The signal came on 22 June. Five days later the General Staff of the Partisan detachments was formed with Tito at its head; on 4 July the Politburo decided to begin the struggle, and on 7 July the first shots of the rising were fired at Bela Crkva in western Serbia.

The two resistance movements that were to decide the fate of Yugoslavia thus started from entirely different positions. Mihailović’s Chetniks were an officers’ movement, monarchist and Serbian, counting on a British victory and the return of the pre-war state. Tito’s Partisans were to be a revolutionary movement, supranational by design, which sought to combine the struggle against the occupier with the seizure of power. The former believed it was too early for a rising. The latter decided after 22 June that it must begin at once, whatever the cost.

Place in the war

Mihailović’s arrival on Ravna Gora went unnoticed by anyone in May 1941. The Germans, busy preparing the attack on the Soviet Union, were withdrawing most of their front-line divisions from Serbia, leaving behind a few weak occupation divisions made up of older age groups. Only in the summer, when the rising broke out, did it become clear how much the small group from Suvobor counted for.

In the late summer of 1941 some Chetnik detachments joined the fighting begun by the Communists and, together with the Partisans, captured small towns in western Serbia. In the autumn Mihailović met Tito twice – in September and at the end of October in the village of Brajići at the foot of Ravna Gora – but agreement proved impossible. At the beginning of November open war broke out between the two movements, while the Germans answered the rising with terror, shooting a hundred hostages for every soldier killed. In October they murdered thousands of civilians in Kraljevo and Kragujevac. Shaken, Mihailović was confirmed in his conviction that open struggle led to the destruction of the nation. In December the Germans broke up his camp on Ravna Gora. At the same time, thanks to British propaganda, he became known throughout the world as the symbol of the first resistance movement in occupied Europe, and the government-in-exile promoted him to general and in January 1942 appointed him minister of war. His forces, increasingly called the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, were recognised as the regular armed forces of the kingdom.

The later history of the Ravna Gora movement is one of the most contested chapters in the history of the war in the Balkans. Many Chetnik commanders, especially in Montenegro, Herzegovina and Dalmatia, made arrangements with the Italians, and later with the Germans and the Ustaša authorities, against the Partisans. Chetnik units committed mass crimes against Muslim and Croat civilians, and historians still argue over how far Mihailović ordered them and how far he merely tolerated them or was unable to stop them. The Partisans, for their part, committed crimes against the Chetniks and their supporters. In 1943 the British concluded that it was Tito who was really fighting the Germans, and in 1944 they withdrew their support from Mihailović. The Communists won the civil war, and Mihailović, captured in March 1946, was convicted of treason and war crimes and shot in July of that year. In 2015 a Serbian court annulled the verdict, provoking sharp protests in Croatia and Bosnia. For some, Ravna Gora remained a symbol of loyalty to the king and of the first resistance to Hitler; for others, the beginning of a movement that ended in collaboration and ethnic cleansing.