For King & Country

In Washington, a proud young man from the Serbian mountains told newsmen that General Draja Mihailovich had been misunderstood. While smiling Yugoslav Ambassador Constantin Fotich stood by, offering reporters Scotch and tasty sandwiches, dashing Captain Borislav Todorovich, late of Mihailovich's staff and now assistant military attache, registered his complete dissent from the evidence on which Allied policy toward Yugoslavia has been based. Said Captain Todorovich:

"General Mihailovich now commands between 35 and 40 thousand effectives . . . will mobilize no less than 400 thousand effectives on the day Allied invasion forces land in Yugoslavia. . . . Tito's Partisans do not exceed 20 thousand fighting men. . . . Mihailovich's army is ... representative of the peasants, the workers, the artisans--in a word, the people of Yugoslavia. ... It is sometimes falsely believed that Tito brings progressive ideas to Yugoslavia. Ninety percent of Tito's Partisans are Communists. . . . They kill the most intelligent peasants. . . . Mihailovich is ... very glad about Soviet successes [but] Yugoslavs like their king."

The Captain told a thrilling tale of secret departure from Yugoslavia with two U.S. Army officers who were with him at Chetnik headquarters. But neither he nor his unnamed companions were allowed to tell their full stories.

If their reports corroborated Todorovich, they ran counter to some powerful testimony. Winston Churchill had said in February that Tito had 250 thousand men, was pinning down 14 German divisions, would continue to receive the bulk of Allied aid because he was doing the bulk of the fighting. Highest current British estimate of Mihailovich's strength: 15,000 and dwindling.

Plainly the men around King Peter were up against tremendous odds in their drive to rehabilitate Mihailovich and the cause of the strongly nationalist Serbs. To make their problem harder, Tito's sponsors in Moscow threw out a blunt hint, via War & The Working Class: "It is high time . . . the Governments of the United Nations broke off diplomatic relations with the bankrupt group of Yugoslav officials and police in Cairo who represent nobody but themselves. It is high time to recognize [Tito's] Government."

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