Posted on 10/28/2010 1:06:22 PM PDT by Ravnagora
BELGRADE, Serbia -- An American whose U.S. Air Force bomber was shot down over the Balkans during World War II is on a new mission in the region: Correct a historic injustice against a former Serb guerrilla leader.
In the summer of 1944, Lt. Col. Milton Friend's B-24 Liberator was downed by German fighter planes over central Serbia. He said Gen. Draza Mihailovic saved his life - and those of 500 of his fellow airmen - in the largest air rescue of Americans behind enemy lines during a war.
The former Air Force navigator, now 88 and living in Boynton Beach, Florida, is to testify at a Belgrade court Friday at a hearing to exonerate the Serb general, whom Yugoslav communists sentenced as a Nazi collaborator and executed in 1946.
Mihailovic was not "a villain, but a hero," Friend said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press.
"He saved 500 people and helped them rejoin their families. He did not save only 500 lives, but thousands of their future generations now living in the United States," Friend said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
PING!
Mihailovic's one overarching goal was an independent Serbia.
He started his WWII engagements as an enemy of the Nazis and fought them.
When the partisans threw in their lot with the Soviets, he switched sides against them and worked with the Nazis in order to delay a Communist takeover of Serbia.
In the meantime, he hedged his bets by helping out American and British military and intelligence however he could.
His thinking was probably that whatever ground the Nazis held would be surrendered to the Americans and English in preference to the Soviets, so that it was in his best interests to assist the Nazis and to build a rapport with the English and Americans.
When the English and Americans effectively ceded control over the Balkans at Yalta to the Soviets, Mihailovic was left high and dry and his Nazi connections gave the new regime all they needed to eliminate a prominent opponent of their rule.
Then decades later we bomb the hell out of the Serbs for trying to protect their land from Islam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Halyard
For more information about General Draza Mihailovich, the Chetniks, the Halyard Mission Rescue Operation, Serbia in WWII, etc. please visit www.generalmihailovich.com and www.babamim.com
*****
“Then decades later we bomb the hell out of the Serbs for trying to protect their land from Islam.”
Well put; when Abraham Lincoln did was Milosevic did, he was a hero. The allies that awarded Central Powers territory to Serbia for fighting for the allies after WWI came back 75 years later and said, “Thanks for the infrastructure investment & modernization; you can leave now, and take all Serbs with you...”
Yes, you know better than the US airmen who were there. /s
Ustasa sympathizers are stricken with an allergy to the truth.
Awesome!
Just Awesome!
So, Mihailovic had a crystal ball to know those US pilots were going to get shot down all over Serbia? And because of this "vision" he sent word ahead to all the Serb villagers to risk their lives protecting the Airmen so they could be used as political pawns in a game that he never played? (Because Mihailovic never asked nor was given anything for saving the American pilots, other than the medal after his death.) You are saying that he also convinced ordinary Serb villagers to allow themselves & their families to be burned to death by the Nazi Germans for refusing to hand over the US Airmen in order to do what exactly? Because again, neither Mihailovich nor these villagers ever got anything out of the exchange.) But after the Germans killed Serb families for refusing to turn over the Americans, Mihailovic and his men immediately buddied up to Germans again? Preposterous!
Milovan Djilas, one of Tito's right hand men who later turned dissident, admitted in his book Wartime that "the lines between TITO and the Germans were open until the final days of the war". It was Tito who was collaborating with the Germans. Djilas went on to say that Tito's worst fear was NOT more Germans, but rather an Allied Landing. That's why the US pilots who landed in Tito's area, were never allowed to move around freely where in Mihailovic's area, the Americans had freedom of movement. Tito was afraid that the Americans and British might really see what was going on between him & the Germans.
: (
Dear wideawake,
I have to honestly say that your argument that Mihailovich was a Nazi collaborator is the single most coherent and powerful argument I have ever heard. I mean that sincerely.
If I didn’t know anything about General Mihailovich, I would probably accept it at face value because it sounds perfectly credible, rational, and quite plausible. It doesn’t even smell like the usual propaganda that argues essentially the same thing, but far less cleanly.
But, I do know something about General Mihailovich.
He was no Nazi collaborator.
Hitler and Himmler would agree with me.
*****
Dear wideawake,
I have to honestly say that your argument that Mihailovich was a Nazi collaborator is the single most coherent and powerful argument I have ever heard. I mean that sincerely.
If I didn’t know anything about General Mihailovich, I would probably accept it at face value because it sounds perfectly credible, rational, and quite plausible. It doesn’t even smell like the usual propaganda that argues essentially the same thing, but far less cleanly.
But, I do know something about General Mihailovich.
He was no Nazi collaborator.
Hitler and Himmler would agree with me.
*****
Tito's subordinates also collaborated with the Nazis (in Zagreb).
Would you like me to continue?
And Stalin collaborated with the Nazis until 1942.
This was not about sweetness and light - the war in the Balkans was a total and bloody struggle for power, and each player knew that if he did not win - or side with the winner - he would eventually be shot.
It was not clear whether the Axis or the Alliance would triumph - and in the event of an Allied triumph it was not clear whether it would be the Western half or the Soviet half that would control the Balkans.
Everyone caught in the storm hedged their bets.
Set Stalin aside.
The Germans turned on Mihailovic when Gen. Simovic described him as the “Commander of all Yugoslav armed forces that are fighting in the country…” in late 1942.
For three years (1942-45), both Mihailovic and Tito moved their forces across NDH territories locked in combat with one another, with the Germans, with the Italians, with the Ustashas, or in some triangular form.
Point being, is that there was a Civil War going on in the Balkans within a broader World War (II)----This point often gets missed around here.
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