You're listening to season 11 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is the second of our dedicated Yugoslavia Exile and Grief. Last time I did one of these, one of our patrons suggested that I put together a clip show of the various Yugoslavia research pieces from season 10 for anyone who wants to refresh their memory or listen to them together as a miniseries. I thought that was a great idea and I'm hoping to have it ready before the next installment comes out in three weeks time. And of course we'll return to G Gundam next Week with episode 11.7 Once Upon a Fight in Neo Mexico. For now though, we return to London 1941, where the Yugoslav royal government has just settled in for what they hope will be a brief exile. On June 21, 1941, King Peter II Karadorjevic arrived in London accompanied by his Prime Minister, the 59 year old Air Force General Dushan Simovich, and most of his cabinet. Much of the professional military leadership remained in Cairo, where the remnants of the Yugoslav Royal army were gathering and a number of lower ranking politicians were stationed in South Africa. But there were two crucial exceptions at the top, both of them Croatians. Ivan Ubai, the ban, effectively the Governor of Croatia, set up his office in the United States, already home to a large Croatian immigrant community, while Vlad Ko Maczek, successor to Stepan Radic as leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, leader of the opposition throughout the royal dictatorship years, and now vice premier under Simovic, chose to remain in Yugoslavia to do what he could for his conquered people. We will pick up the threads of their stories in the next episode. For the then 17 year old king, exile in London meant a chance to live the closest thing to a normal teenage life someone in his position was ever likely to get. He attended Cambridge, though he never showed much enthusiasm for his formal studies. And he did all the regular college kid things ate bad cafeteria food, hung out with socialists, joined a rowing club. However, early in his exile he would develop two passions which put him at odds with his government. First, he developed heroic fantasies about returning to Yugoslavia to personally lead the liberation of his homeland, and he met a girl, the fellow exile Princess Alexandra of Greece. It's clear from the sources that the King's ministers objected to this match on political grounds, but I haven't been able to pin down exactly why King Peter's own autobiography doesn't even mention the issue. Though this is mere speculation on my part, the most likely source of objection seems to be the somewhat dubious status of the princess's paternity and title. Though her father, Alexander, was the king of Greece, his marriage to her mother, Aspasiomanos, had been secret and illegal. It was retroactively legitimated after her birth, but by then Alexandra's father was dead of monkey bite induced septicemia. Between this and the see sawing fortunes of the Greek monarchy In the early 20th century, Alexandra spent most of her young life as a penniless exile, and the Yugoslav government likely felt she didn't have much to offer their cause. As for Peter's action hero dreams, at various points in his exile, he tried to personally establish a crack Yugoslav commando unit comprised of soldiers who had escaped from Axis prisoner of war camps. He tried to join the RAF and train as a pilot to personally fly missions over his homeland. He volunteered to parachute into Yugoslavia to link up with Drazha and lead the Chetniks in person. And he attempted to raise an exile legion from the Yugoslav diaspora to liberate the country from the sea. None of these went anywhere, although in a throwback to Nina's season one research, he did develop a habit of sneaking away from Cambridge to use the electro pneumatic link trainers at the local air force base. Only his exile legion plan received any support from his government, probably because at the time they were looking for ways to improve their standing with their British patrons. But the Yugoslav diaspora in the United Kingdom was too small, and the larger community in the United States was predominantly Croatian. And for reasons that will become clear in our next episode, there was too much mutual hostility between them and the royal government for such a plan to work. Even if it had. The Allies had little materiel to spare for the venture, while the Yugoslavs had none at all. What they did have the best thing going for them in the summer of 1941 was, was that they existed. This sounds like I'm taking a dig at them, and I am. But the fact that neither the head of state nor the head of government had been compelled to surrender to Hitler meant that as far as international law and diplomacy were concerned, Yugoslavia still existed. Peter was still its legitimate sovereign, and most significant of all, his country remained formally one of the Allied powers. But this paper legitimacy was about the only kind they had. Remember that earlier in the year, the regent, Prince Paul, had agreed to join the Axis powers. This was an unforgivable betrayal in the eyes of Britain. Paul's ouster soon afterwards earned plaudits from the Allies, but the new government installed by the coup had lasted only 11 days. Had faced only one test, Hitler's ambition, the menace of Axis, and had failed it catastrophically. Under the circumstances, there had probably been no way for the Yugoslav government to win the showdown with Hitler. But even the German army planners who organized the invasion were shocked by the rapidity and totality of their enemy's collapse. The battlefield reputation of the Serbs, won at huge cost during the First World War, was gone. Nor could they offer material aid to the Allied cause. Only about a thousand soldiers had managed to escape the fall of the country. They had no equipment, no prospects for getting any, and were too busy fighting monks themselves to be of any use. In fact, at one point early in their exile, a political dispute between two factions in Cairo, and to be clear, we are talking about fewer than a thousand soldiers total, threatened to break out into violence, and the British were forced to arrest and detain roughly half of the Yugoslav army. Then the ascendant faction overplayed their hand, trying to exact vengeance on the leaders of the other faction, at which point the annoyed British authorities removed them from power and installed one of their own British officers as acting supreme commander of Yugoslav forces until a compromise could be negotiated. So, from the beginning, the British viewed the Yugoslav exiles as friends, but not the kind of friends you could rely on to help you move apartments or defeat fascism. Publicly, the exiles tried to make the best of it. Prime Minister Simovich got on the radio and explained that while, yes, to the untrained eye, it might appear that Yugoslavia's army had folded like a house of cards at the first gentle sighing of the breeze. But in fact, Yugoslavia had distracted Nazi attention at a crucial moment, forestalling attacks on allied Turkey and Russia, thereby saving both countries and the whole Allied cause. And really, shouldn't Yugoslavia be rewarded for its heroic sacrifice once the war was won, perhaps with some juicy morsels of Italian territory? Peter would adopt this dubious line of argument for his own memoir writing. Because of the invasion of Yugoslavia, Hitler was forced to put off his plan to attack Russia until the terrible winter came on. And this delay alone was an invaluable contribution to Allied victory. When word arrived that a certain Colonel Drazha Mihailovi was gathering a guerrilla army in the mountains, Simovich and his government were elated, because now they could claim that the Yugoslav army had not really been defeated at all. It was still out there, still fighting the good fight. This made for good propaganda, but the exiles didn't really believe it. They knew they had overseen a humiliating debacle, and the first question they took up after establishing themselves in London. Who to blame for it? Since this would be the immediate focus for much of their time and energy, let us indulge in the blame game a little ourselves. To start, the person most responsible for the invasion and destruction of Yugoslavia would be Hitler, naturally. But after him, the dubious honor of second place must go to Prime Minister Simovich. Dushan Simovich had come to power in the coup that ousted Prince Paul, and depending on who you asked, he was either a key supporter of the conspiracy, its mastermind and overall leader, or merely an opportunistic figurehead who seized on the chance for advancement. He was the highest ranking and best connected officer to join the conspiracy, and more or less declared himself Prime Minister and chief of the General Staff of the army during the chaos, giving himself supreme military and political power. He pitched himself as a patriotic dictator to guide the inexperienced king and steer the ship of state through the present crisis. His record in this preeminent role would prove mixed in that while some of his decisions were pretty bad, many were even worse. The coup itself was triggered and publicly justified by Prince Paul's decision to sign the Tripartite Pact. The regent and his government understood that Yugoslavia was not in a position to fight the Axis alone, and neither would their allies be able to send help. Paul believed that the Germans would be satisfied, at least temporarily, with a neutral Yugoslavia, so long as it did not interfere in the Axis campaigns further south in Greece and continued providing raw materials for the German war machine. By this point, Germany was already the country's biggest trading partner, so this would simply have been a continuation of the status quo. Even considering Paul's impossible position, I still don't think he should have tried to cut a deal with the Nazis. That's my bias and I'll cop to it. So initially I was pretty sympathetic to the conspirators and the new government they formed. But it turns out their objection to the Tripartite Pact was maybe one of those explanations you say in public because it sounds better than your actual motivations. While the Simovich government publicly refused to ratify the pact, Simovich himself privately assured Germany that of course Yugoslavia would still honor the agreement exactly as signed to the Allies. He then justified himself by saying that while he was personally opposed to the Axis, Yugoslavia was simply too weak to fight on its own and could not afford an openly anti German foreign policy. You know, exactly the same thing Prince Paul had said. But if Simovich planned to follow exactly the same foreign policy, then what was the real motivation for the coup? Considering some of the political triangulations that he would attempt during his time in exile, and the fact that he had already been involved in two unrelated coup d' etat attempts in his career. It seems apparent to me that Simovich had exactly one firmly held belief when the chips are down in the dark of night with their back against the wall. No matter what crisis loomed, Yugoslavia would be better off if he were in charge. But what about the other conspirators, the junior officers who planned and actually carried out the coup under Simovich's authority? What was their real motivation? I want you to hold onto that question like it's a precious jewel, because we will come back to it in the next episode. What Simovich and his government failed to recognize once they took power was that the coup itself had changed their posture vis a vis Germany. All the public pronouncements about repudiating the pact and the sight of rapturous crowds cheering what they thought was the end of cooperation with Germany had infuriated Hitler. He already hated the Yugoslavs. In the Nazi racial hierarchy, all Slavs were treacherous, subhuman vermin. And he had a special disdain for the Serbs who had humiliated his native Austria during the First World War. Now the vermin dared to defy him, to reject his oh so generous offer of an alliance. The Faustian bargain that he had offered Paul was now off the table. He intended to teach the Yugoslavs the consequences of insubordination. Outnumbered, outgunned, internally divided and externally encircled, Yugoslavia would have struggled to repel the Axis invasion under any circumstances. But the Royal army was large and in some respects, well equipped. Given a war plan that played to their strengths, they might have made a real fight of it. Instead, Yugoslavia's war plan called for a defensive cordon along all 3,000 km of frontier. There was no serious provision for defense in depth, no effort to capitalize on Yugoslavia's extremely rugged terrain, and no contingency to prevent fast moving German units from exploiting the first opening in the line to encircle and destroy the defenders, exactly as had happened in France the year before. Worse, the country lacked the infrastructure for rapid mobilization. Once the order was given, Yugoslav columns would need to make their way from the interior of the country to their positions on the border. For most units, that would mean marching in long infantry columns through mountains. Yet despite receiving intelligence from a military attache in Berlin that accurately predicted the details of the German invasion down to the exact date, Simovich hesitated to order troops to the border. He did not believe the intelligence he had received. In his mind, he still had plenty of time. So when war did break out, the fortified defensive positions at the border were mostly unmanned and the bulk of the Yugoslav army was caught on the march, their exposed columns making perfect targets for German air power. Perhaps it's a little unfair to blame Prime Minister Simovich for following a bad plan inherited from the previous government. By the time he became Prime Minister, Simovich probably knew that this plan was doomed. But war plans are complex things, and a mere 11 days in office was not enough time to prepare and disseminate a replacement. So the blame for the total failure of the Yugoslav defense of ought to be shared with the man who came up with the plan back in 1938, a Serb air force general named Dushan Simovic. Ah, well. Nevertheless, Simovich wanted to be a kind of stable, patriotic center around which to balance the competing interests of the different national factions. He was a Serb himself, but in the long standing ideological struggle between chauvinist great Serbianism and and pluralist Yugoslavism, he represented the latter. But the fall and flight into exile had shifted the balance within his government. The leader of the Croatian faction was absent, the leader of the Slovenian faction had been killed in the bombing of Belgrade, and the leader of the Bosnian faction was now working for the axis. The Great Serbia faction was ascendant in London. They resented Simovich's concessions to the national minorities, and in January 1942 they showed the increasingly isolated general the door to the great relief of the young king who had come to resent the Prime Minister's high handed guidance in his personal and political life. Counting General Simovich, Peter would eventually run through five prime ministers during his time in exile, including one in the summer of 43 who lasted just 45 days. Or, to use the internationally recognized standard for measuring the length of a primary premiership, 0.9 of Eliz Truss. As the historian Josip Tomashevic dryly put it, governments in exile are seldom great successes, and that of the Yugoslavs was less successful than most. After Simovich, there was a renowned scholar of constitutional law who proved to be an ineffectual prime minister, followed by a mid level party politician who turned out to be an ineffectual prime minister, and then an obscure bureaucrat promoted beyond his wildest expectations and to the exalted rank of ineffectual prime minister. You get the idea. Their names and personal biographies are not terribly illuminating. Instead, I have found it more useful to think of them as representing different stages in the royal government's grief over the abrupt loss of their country. During the Simovich era, everyone was Keeping both eyes on the future and the eventual inevitable, perhaps imminent restoration of royal rule in Yugoslavia. Their animating concern was simply who is going to be in charge after the allies win and things go back to normal. So let's call this stage denial. With Simovich's fall, the Great Serbia faction seized the reins of power is the wrong word for it. Nobody in the government in exile had any power, but they did seize the reins of something. The new leadership under Prime Minister Slobodan Yovanovitch pinned the blame for Yugoslavia's defeat on the non Serbs, especially the Croats, who they accused of undermining the Royal army during the invasion. Reports of grotesque atrocities against ethnic Serbs by the fascist Ustaa government were starting to filter in, and the Yovanovic cabinet seized on these as evidence of widespread Croatian villainy. This put them into perfect alignment with the Serbian nationalist Chetniks and their leader, Drazha. The rebel colonel was swiftly promoted to the highest possible rank in the Royal army and was made minister in absentia of army, navy and air forces in the new cabinet. He and the legend of heroic resistance growing around him, now became the government in exile's most valuable asset. But tying themselves to the Chetniks created new risks. The royal government was fully dependent on the goodwill of their British patrons, and they were counting on the Western allies to restore them to power once Yugoslavia was liberated. If the British were to turn away from the Chetniks, if they were to lose faith in Drazha, then they might also abandon the Karadjordjevic dynasty altogether. The government in exile committed its limited resources to aggressive pro Chetnik, anti Croat, anti partisan propaganda. As it became increasingly clear that the heroic Chetniks depicted in official propaganda were bore only the vaguest resemblance to the real thing, the government in exile and its allies launched even more ferocious invectives against their perceived enemies. The attacks grew so venomous that the United States government had to drag representatives of all the various Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian American newspapers into a meeting together and made them sign a pledge to stop undermining the war effort with their constant bickering. Even then, the main Serbian American newspaper refused to sign and six months later had to be admonished again, this time by the director of the Office of War Information to stop its violent attacks upon all people of Croatian extraction and their clergy, its strong anti Catholic attacks and its veiled efforts to defend the Quisling Nedic, who supported the Nazi regime in Serbia, which were aiding the Nazi campaigns of intolerance and race hate and damaging to the American war effort. There was an opportunity here either to preserve some dignity by bailing on the Chetniks once their true nature became impossible to deny, or by convincing the Chetniks to stop trying to exterminate the partisans, stop collaborating with the Axis, and actually start acting like the resistance fighters they claimed to be. The British would have been thrilled, but to do either of these would have required humility and compromise. So they were never going to happen. Meanwhile, back in country, Drazha was now actively collaborating with the Italian occupation forces and the quislings running Serbia. On February 28, 1943, he gave a drunken speech to his officers about how the English were not their friends, complaining that perfidious Albion was using the war to attempt to wipe out the Serbian people, that they were keeping the Karadjordjevic family prisoner in Londo
But it's still funny. You could say a lettuce.
No, the lettuce lasted longer.
The lettuce would be even more confusing for people who listen to this, you know, five years from now.
Yeah. As the historian Jozo as the historian Jozo Tomashevich as the historian Jozo as the historian Jozo Tomashevich. As the historian Jozo Tomas.
Jozo. The way you say his first name sounds like a American trying to say Joel.
It's spelled J O, Z O. And I don't think it's supposed to be Yozo. I should just say. I should. I should say Joseph because it is a. That's his actual name. Joseph is his nickname. Sa.