The split between the Partisans and the Chetniks

During the night of 1–2 November 1941 Chetnik detachments under Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović closed in from several directions on Užice, a town in western Serbia which for two months had housed the Supreme Staff of the communist Partisans and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, headed by Josip Broz Tito. At dawn on 2 November Chetniks from Požega attacked Trešnjica hill on the eastern approaches to the town, while other columns tried to enter Užice from the direction of Zlatibor, Kosjerić and Mokra Gora. After some ten hours of fighting the Partisans had beaten off every attack. The Chetniks came to a halt in the suburbs of Sevojno and Zabučje and that same day fell back on Požega. So ended the brief, mistrustful cooperation between two resistance movements which since the summer had together been liberating western Serbia from German occupation. A civil war began that, with interruptions, would last until 1945.

The events of 2 November are sometimes described as a “political conflict” between Tito’s left and Mihailović’s “more conservative Serbs”. That is an understatement. The political dispute had been going on since September, and at the beginning of November it turned into armed struggle. Nor was it a conflict between Serbs and someone else: in Serbia both the Chetniks and the Partisans were overwhelmingly Serbs. What divided them was the aim of the war and their attitude to the occupier, not nationality. As for the date, most Western studies, including the classic work by Jozo Tomasevich, state that the Chetniks struck on 1 November. Yugoslav historians, who reconstructed the course of the fighting in detail, show that the detachments set off during the night of 1–2 November and that the main attack on Užice came on the morning of 2 November. The Chetnik side, for its part, claimed that it was the Partisans who had first “treacherously” attacked Požega during the night of 31 October–1 November. Each side blamed the other, and the argument over who fired first continues in Serbia to this day.

Two movements, one uprising

After the capitulation of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Germans placed a truncated Serbia under military administration and partitioned the rest of the country with Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ustaše state. In May Colonel Mihailović set up camp on Ravna Gora, on the slopes of the Suvobor massif, and began building a clandestine organisation of officers loyal to King Peter II. His strategy was one of waiting: build a secret army, avoid provoking German reprisals and strike only when the Allies appeared in the Balkans. The communists, a disciplined party used to working underground, were waiting for a signal from Moscow. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June, Tito called for armed struggle. On 7 July, at Bela Crkva near Krupanj, the first shots of the uprising in Serbia were fired, and a few days later the uprising in Montenegro broke out.

The uprising soon went beyond the communists’ plans. The villages of western Serbia, which remembered the victories over Austria-Hungary in 1914, supplied volunteers, while the weak German occupation divisions, made up of older age groups, shut themselves up in their garrisons. Some of Mihailović’s officers were unwilling to stand idly by while students, workers and peasants under communist command did the fighting. At the end of August some Chetnik detachments, often without Ravna Gora’s consent, joined in. On 31 August the Chetniks took Loznica on the Drina; then, together with the Partisans, they captured Krupanj, Gornji Milanovac and Čačak, and jointly besieged Valjevo and Kraljevo. On 24 September the Partisans took Užice. The result was the largest liberated territory in occupied Europe, named after the war the Republic of Užice. The Partisans themselves did not use that name, and in practice they shared power in the area with the Chetniks: the communists ruled in Užice, the Chetniks in Požega, while in Čačak and Gornji Milanovac the two sides held power equally. In the vaults of the local branch of the National Bank the Partisans set up a rifle and ammunition factory, their newspaper Borba appeared in the town, and national liberation committees, schools and a postal service were at work.

The common front, however, was fragile from the outset. Mihailović regarded himself as the only legitimate commander of the royal forces in the country and demanded that the Partisans submit to him. At the beginning of September his envoys were in Belgrade with General Milan Nedić, who had become prime minister of the collaborationist government a few days earlier, and, according to a later account by the German occupation authorities, discussed joint action against the communists. Tito, for his part, had no intention of surrendering the leadership of a movement he had created himself, and his party openly announced that the struggle against the occupier was to merge with revolution. Both sides also used violence against people they regarded as political enemies.

Talks at Struganik and Brajići

Tito left Belgrade on 16 September and reached the liberated territory by way of Čačak. As early as 19 September he met Mihailović in the house of one of the latter’s officers in the village of Struganik at the foot of Ravna Gora. The conversation showed how far apart they were. Tito proposed a joint offensive, a joint staff and the sharing of captured weapons. Mihailović considered a general uprising premature and suicidal, since every attack on the Germans brought mass executions of hostages down on Serbian villages. The only agreement was that the two movements would not fight each other.

The following weeks brought events that strengthened one side’s will to fight and convinced the other that the fighting had to stop. On 16 September the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, ordered that fifty to a hundred “communists” be killed for every German soldier killed. The Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia, Franz Böhme, applied the higher rate without exception. Between 15 and 20 October the Wehrmacht shot some two thousand men in Kraljevo, and on 21 October between 2,778 and 2,794 people in Kragujevac, among them secondary-school pupils, according to the findings of Serbian and German researchers. The hostages shot that autumn included almost all the adult Jewish men of Serbia. To Mihailović this was proof that open insurrection led to the destruction of the nation. To the Partisans it was proof that no accommodation with the occupier was possible.

At the end of October the first British mission from Cairo, sent by the Special Operations Executive, reached Užice. It was led by Captain Duane T. Hudson, known as Bill, a mining engineer who had worked in Yugoslavia before the war. Landed from a submarine on the Montenegrin coast on 20 September, he crossed Partisan-held territory, met Tito in Užice around 25 October and then went on to Mihailović’s headquarters. At that time London knew of only one resistance leader in Yugoslavia: Mihailović, with whom it had been in radio contact since September and whom BBC broadcasts presented as a hero.

On 26 or 27 October (sources give both dates) Tito and Mihailović met a second time, in the village of Brajići below Ravna Gora. The talks were based on a twelve-point letter Tito had sent a week earlier. Mihailović rejected the most important proposals: a joint command, joint action against the Germans and the collaborationist units, joint supply, and national liberation committees as the local authority. Only secondary matters were agreed, above all the avoidance of clashes. The Partisans promised to supply the Chetniks with weapons from the Užice factory and, according to Yugoslav historians, at the end of October handed over several hundred rifles and ammunition, which Mihailović confirmed at his trial in 1946.

An offer to the Germans

Mihailović did not come to Brajići in good faith. In a telegram of 28 October to the prime minister of the government-in-exile, General Dušan Simović, he wrote that peace with the communists would not last long, because they would not give up Užice and Čačak to him, and that the arms factory at Užice was too important to his forces to be left to the enemy. That same day two of his officers, Colonel Branislav Pantić and Captain Nenad Mitrović, were already in Belgrade. They spoke first to Nedić and then to Captain Josef Matl of German military intelligence. They declared that Mihailović was ready to place himself and his men at the occupier’s disposal in the fight against communism, and asked for weapons: according to a German note, some five thousand rifles, 350 light and 20 heavy machine guns. The Germans invited Mihailović to talks in Belgrade. He replied that because of the “general conflict” with the Partisans he could not leave his headquarters.

Yugoslav historians also point to other signs of the coming clash. During the night of 28–29 October Chetniks from Požega dragged Milan Blagojević, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and commander of the 1st Šumadija Partisan Detachment, off a train and murdered him a few days later. According to the post-war testimony of the Chetnik officer who led the attack on Užice, the plan to attack from four directions, with the help of a clandestine unit hidden inside the town itself, was drawn up at Mihailović’s headquarters around 26 or 27 October – that is, at the same time as the talks at Brajići.

The battle for Užice and the Partisan counter-attack

The attack of 2 November ended in defeat for the Chetniks. They overestimated their own strength and underestimated the numbers of the Partisans, who in western Serbia were clearly the stronger side. The clandestine unit in the town failed to seize the key points, and the Chetniks from Požega were routed on Trešnjica. The Partisans went straight over to the counter-attack. On the afternoon of 3 November they took Požega, losing some thirty killed by their own count. That same day a Chetnik liaison officer appeared in Užice proposing a truce, and Tito agreed to halt the fighting, but the ceasefire did not last even a few days.

In the first week of November the fighting spread across the whole of liberated Serbia. Mihailović ordered his men to seize Čačak, but some of the Chetnik detachments besieging Kraljevo together with the Partisans refused to obey the order; their commander, Major Radoslav Đurić, even warned the Partisans of the planned attack. During the night of 6–7 November the Chetniks used a ruse to seize the hospital in Gornji Milanovac, where some hundred and twenty Partisans were quartered, and took them prisoner. On 7 and 8 November a Chetnik attack on Čačak and a second attack on Užice from the north were beaten off. The fighting was fierce and merciless. According to historians’ findings, at Brajići, near Mihailović’s headquarters, the Chetniks shot at least forty prisoners on 6–9 November, among them nurses and wounded men. In Čačak the Partisans arrested Chetniks’ families and disarmed their units, and both sides killed people regarded as supporters of the enemy. By mid-November the Partisans had surrounded Ravna Gora, and Mihailović’s headquarters was on the verge of destruction.

The meeting at Divci

In this situation Mihailović met the Germans. On 11 November, in the village of Divci near Valjevo, he held talks with representatives of German military intelligence and the command in Serbia. The circumstances of the meeting remain disputed to this day, as does the question of whose initiative it was. According to the German record, Mihailović gave assurances that he had no intention of fighting the occupier and that his actions against the Germans had been intended merely to forestall the communists in taking the towns; he asked for weapons and ammunition to fight the Partisans, stipulating that the contact be kept secret. The Germans, convinced that the Chetniks would turn against them anyway as soon as they felt strong enough, demanded unconditional surrender. The talks came to nothing, and soon afterwards the Germans tried to capture Mihailović. According to historians’ findings, on 13 November the Chetniks handed several hundred captured Partisans over to the occupation authorities, and the Germans shot many of them at the end of the month. Neither the British nor the government in London knew about the talks at Divci.

The British had nonetheless seen enough. The first arms drop for Mihailović arrived from Malta on 9 November. On 13 November Hudson asked Cairo to suspend deliveries until Mihailović stopped fighting the Partisans, because British weapons were serving the civil war rather than the fight against the Germans. In London, however, unity was what was wanted, and there was faith in Mihailović. On 15 November General Simović announced on the radio that Mihailović was commander of all Yugoslav armed forces in the country, and the BBC called his forces the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland. London and the government-in-exile also asked Moscow to bring its influence to bear on the Partisans. Joseph Stalin, who maintained relations with the royal government, wanted nothing that might worry his Western allies, but he did not order the Partisans to submit to Mihailović.

The German offensive and the fall of Užice

The civil war in Serbia was cut short by the enemy of both movements. The Germans, reinforced by the 342nd Infantry Division brought from France and the 113th Infantry Division, had been conducting operations against the insurgents since the end of September, and in mid-November they struck in the valley of the Western Morava. Under their pressure Tito proposed talks. On 20 November in Čačak, Partisan delegates, among them Aleksandar Ranković and Petar Stambolić, signed a truce with the Chetniks that halted the fighting from noon on 21 November and provided for a mixed commission to investigate the “fratricidal” clashes. Hudson was present and reported to Cairo that the Partisans were the stronger side and that Mihailović intended “first to liquidate the Partisans with British weapons before turning seriously against the Germans”.

There was no joint defence. On 22 November an ammunition store exploded in the vaults of the bank in Užice, killing workers of the Partisan factory and civilians sheltering there. On 25 November the Germans began the final phase of the offensive, called Operation Uzice in German documents and, in Yugoslav historiography, part of the “First Enemy Offensive”. Within a few days they had occupied most of the liberated territory; Čačak fell on 28 November. That day Tito and Mihailović spoke for the last time, by telephone. Tito announced that he would defend his positions, Mihailović that he was dispersing his forces. On 29 November at the Kadinjača pass, fourteen kilometres from Užice, the Užice Workers’ Battalion and several Partisan companies held up the German 342nd Division for several hours to allow the wounded and equipment to be evacuated. The battalion was almost wiped out, together with its commander. In the evening the Germans entered Užice, from which Tito escaped at the last moment. The next day German tanks reached Zlatibor, where, according to Serbian sources, some hundred wounded Partisans were shot. At the beginning of December the remnants of the Partisans crossed the Uvac river into the Sandžak, territory occupied by the Italians.

Place in the war

The split of November 1941 decided the shape of the war in Yugoslavia. The uprising in Serbia collapsed faster than anyone had expected, and the German command reported with surprise that the communist movement in Serbia could be regarded as defeated. According to German figures the insurgents lost some two thousand men in the final offensive, and tens of thousands of civilians in Serbia died in the reprisal executions of the autumn of 1941. The Partisans lost Serbia for two and a half years. On 21 December 1941, at Rudo in Bosnia, Tito formed the 1st Proletarian Brigade from the best units that had withdrawn from Užice and Montenegro: the first mobile formation able to fight far from its men’s home villages. From it grew the army that in 1945 took power over the whole country.

Mihailović had lost too, though he did not yet know it. On 30 November his commanders decided, and he approved, that some of his units would join the “legal” formations of the Nedić government in order to survive the winter and go on fighting the communists without exposing themselves to the Germans. At the beginning of December the Germans struck at Ravna Gora itself, and Mihailović narrowly escaped capture. At the same time London promoted him to general and made him a symbol of resistance in occupied Europe, and in January 1942 he became minister of war in the government-in-exile. From November 1941 his movement increasingly fought the Partisans instead of the occupier, and in the years that followed many of his commanders made arrangements with the Italians and the Germans. The Partisans, too, did not shy away from talking to the enemy when it suited them: in March 1943 they negotiated a ceasefire and an exchange of prisoners with the Germans. The civil war that began outside Užice lasted until 1945 and was part of a war in which, according to the most widely accepted estimates, some one million people died in Yugoslavia, a large proportion of them at the hands of their own compatriots. Its reckoning, from Mihailović’s trial and execution in 1946 to the disputes over memory in today’s Serbia, still divides people in the Balkans.