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.
It is a Friday evening in April 1994. You're watching TV Asahi. G Gundam ought to be airing, but instead you're stuck watching some brat kid wander around the Sunrise offices for half an hour. It hurts to see someone else living the life that should be yours. When it ends, your dad flips over to the evening news on TV Tokyo. You like this one because sometimes they have a talking dog reporter who sounds an awful lot like Crayon Shin Chan's dad. Not today, though. Instead, there is a special report on the wars in Yugoslavia. Washington has brokered a ceasefire between two of the three factions fighting in Bosnia, and the siege of Mostar has been lifted. Your mom hopes this will lead to lasting peace, but your dad isn't so sure. There was that massacre in Sarajevo, remember? And the Serbs just shot down a NATO jet in the safe zone around Gorazde. Unbidden, a scene from one of your shows plays in your head. Mobile suits fighting on streets that look just like yours. You hope G Gundam will start next week. It's been a while since we last visited the former Yugoslavia here on msb, so let's begin this first Yugoslavia interlude episode with a refresher. During the Middle Ages, migrating Slavic tribes invaded, then settled in the Roman held territory of the Balkan Peninsula. Those in the far south in Greece became Hellenized, but in the northern parts of the Balkans they retained their Slavic identity even as they adopted Christianity. Collectively, they came to be known as the south, or Yugo Slavs, though they shared a language. The Yugoslavs were divided into a more northwestern group, the Croats, who were strongly influenced by the neighboring Frankish Empire a more southeastern group, the Serbs, who were more influenced by the neighboring Byzantine Empire, and the Bosnians in the middle, initially influenced by the Magyar Hungarians and later by the Ottoman Turks. All three peoples managed to establish independent realms during the Middle Ages, but each eventually fell prey to more powerful neighbors. After a succession Crisis in the 1090s, a divided Croatia was seized by the Arpad dynasty of Hungary. When the Arpads died out in 1301, the crowns of both kingdoms passed first to the House of Anjou and then to the Habsburgs of Austria. Meanwhile, the Serbian state was mauled by the Ottomans in a series of wars from 1370 until 1459, when the last holdouts were absorbed into the rapidly expanding Turkish empire. Bosnia suffered the same fate A few years later but unlike their cousins to the south, who remained devoutly Orthodox, most Bosnians converted to Islam. Over the next three centuries, the Balkans saw almost constant war between the Austrians and the Ottomans, with little change in the status quo. Then, in the 1800s, inspired by New ideas of nationalism, the European Ottoman territories went into revolt one after another. Serbia achieved de facto autonomy in 1817, then full independence in 1878. During this time, Serbian nationalists cultivated bands of pro Serb, anti Ottoman rebels called Chetniks in neighboring provinces with significant Serb populations, including Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo and Northern Macedonia. They were proponents of a political philosophy which we call Greater Serbianism. Their goal, to unite all Serbs into one country and to control all the territory that had belonged to the short lived Serbian Empire some 500 years previous. But at the same time, a rival movement, Yugoslavism, was articulating a competing vision for the future of the Balkans. A union of all the South Slavic peoples into one independent, multi ethnic pluralist state. Habsburg territorial ambitions in the Balkans threatened both movements. And in 1914, Bosnian Serb rebels associated with the Greater Serbian Movement provided the spark that ignited World War I when they assassinated the heir to the Austro Hungarian throne in occupied Sarajevo. Serbia suffered badly during the war, but emerged on the winning side, having garnered tremendous international prestige for its tenacious defense in the process. In the post war settlement, the Balkan Slav Habsburg territories, Slovenia and Croatia were amalgamated with the Kingdom of Serbia in order to create a new Yugoslav kingdom. From one perspective, this was a kind of compromise between Greater Serbianism and the old imperial practice of awarding territory to the victors after a war on the one hand, and Yugoslavism and the new idea of national self determination on the other. But realistically, the compromise was a sham. In practice, this was Serbian annexation of Croat and Slovene territory. The new state inherited basically all the institutions of the old Serbian kingdom, including its centralized federal structure and its Serbian royal family. Its electoral laws were designed to ensure a permanent Serb majority in parliament. And efforts by the national minorities to redress the power imbalance were shut down, first by the arrests and assassinations of their political leaders, including Stepan Radic, the de facto leader of the opposition, and then by the dissolution of parliament in favor of old fashioned absolutist royal dictatorship. Despite the unresolved tensions between Croat and Serb populations between Yugoslavism and Greater Serbianism, successive royal dictators managed to hold the country together until the outbreak of World War II, even if just barely. But at that point an Axis invasion shattered the royal army practically overnight and broke the country up into zones of influence. Two competing Rebel movements emerged almost immediately. The Chetniks and the Partisans. While the Chetnik leaders were avowedly royalist and the Partisans Communist, the true animating difference between the factions was that the Chetniks fought for Greater Serbia. Even their name was a reference to the famous anti Ottoman rebels of the glorious past. While the Partisans embraced Yugoslavism, unity and brotherhood were their watchwords. Cooperation between the two movements broke down almost immediately. When Chetnik leadership concluded that the Partisans and their philosophy represented a more immediate threat than fascism. They would spend the rest of the war collaborating on and off with the occupation regime and its German masters. In the end, this would prove their undoing. By the time the Partisans achieved military dominance throughout Yugoslavia, the surviving Chetnik leadership had lost all credibility in the eyes of the people and the world. Axis military planners had once hoped to rely on a combination of low quality garrison units, army auxiliaries and local puppets to cow the Yugoslav people. With German strategic, logistical and industrial power at their back, even a second string force like that should have had little trouble brushing aside the disorganized, barefoot, largely illiterate peasant rebels. But by May 1944, it was obvious they had been wrong. Again and again, the occupiers and their Chetnik allies had sent tens of thousands of soldiers, supported by tanks, air power and artillery, transported by rail and motor vehicles, to encircle and destroy the Partisans, who, if they were particularly well equipped, might have a few mules to carry their baggage. These massive operations killed a lot of soldiers, the wounded, doctors and nurses, prisoners of war, hostages, civilians who happened to be nearby. But Axis brutality only served to strengthen partisan resolve. The last major offensive, an airborne raid on partisan headquarters intended to be a decapitation strike, only revealed the diminished state of the Axis forces. The writing was on the wall. The Partisans were at the gates and the Soviets were knocking on the back door. In Greece and Italy, the Allies were tightening the noose. The house was on fire. And the situation, like these metaphors, was out of control. The Partisans were going to win. It was time to get used to the idea. But a partisan victory on the battlefield, a Communist victory, did not necessarily resolve the political question. What would the new Yugoslavia look like? Would the Western democracies allow the country to go Communist? Would the American and British soldiers stationed in Italy and Austria turn on the partisans in order to evict the Soviets and put the young King Peter back on his throne? Would they have a British puppet instead of a German one? Right up until the last possible moment, many among the Chetniks, the collaboration governments and the occupying forces truly believed that the fall of Germany would trigger the natural next stage in the war, that the Western powers with Germany would fight against the Soviet Union. Something similar had already happened when the Italians switched over to the Allied side. If that scenario came to pass, the holdouts expected the American and British troops stationed in Italy and Austria to surge across the border and back them against the Soviet aligned partisans. The German commander in the Balkans believed this so fervently that he refused direct orders to surrender, convinced that the day of reckoning and the great realignment of the factions was imminent. The Soviets were worried about this too. They knew the British wanted Yugoslavia within their sphere of influence. Protecting the Mediterranean shipping routes to Egypt and through the Suez to India remained their overriding strategic goal. Stalin himself ordered Tito, the partisan leader, to move slowly, play the game, build power within the system, avoid direct confrontations and under no circumstances antagonize the Westerners. What followed was a masterclass in political maneuver by Tito and the political wing of his partisan coalition as he methodically co opted or eliminated all of his rivals en route to forging the first truly Yugoslav state in history. And then it was all very nearly undone by one of the most shocking and impactful betrayals in modern political history. But before we get there, we should acquaint ourselves with a few of Tito's rivals who at this moment are beginning to come to terms with the implications of partisan victory. This week we'll begin with the youngest of them, someone who has been hanging around on the periphery of our story thus far, just waiting for his moment in the spotlight. The young king of Yugoslavia, Peter ii. Karadjordjevic. We haven't discussed the Yugoslav royals or their government since old King Alexander was gunned down in Marseille. But they are about to play their last major role in this story. So let's catch up. King Peter was born in 1923 in what was then known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He was the eldest child of Alexander and his wife Maria, a Romanian princess, and through her mother's line, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a great granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The Karadjordjevi's were unusual by European monarchic standards. First, they were a native Serbian dynasty born of the people they ruled. And second, they had come to the throne relatively recently. The family Karadjordjevic descended from Kara George, Black George, leader of an early 19th century rebellion against Ottoman rule. The so called First Serbian Uprising, which lasted from 1804 to 1813. As the name implies, this uprising Failed. The Serbs were subjected to horrifying reprisals by Ottoman troops, and Belgrade, the capital of the rebel state, was treated with special brutality when it fell. In the aftermath, the Ottomans issued a general amnesty for surviving rebels, but excluded Kara Georgeorg himself. He managed to slip across the border into Austria, where he was imprisoned, then transferred to a somewhat more comfortable exile in Russia. In 1817, four years after the end of his uprising, Kara Georgeorge got in touch with a group of Greek nationalists and learned that they were planning a new Pan Balkan uprising. Hoping to raise the flag of revolt in Serbia once again, Kara George and a single companion, a bodyguard and secretary named Nalm, slipped back across the border into their homeland. But the situation in Serbia had changed while Kara George was away. One of the other rebel leaders who accepted that 1813amnesty offer was a nobleman named Milosz Obrenovic. In the intervening years, he had reached an accommodation with the Ottoman authorities, which made him effectively the absolute ruler of Serbia under Ottoman sovereignty. He had no interest in letting the exiled rebel chief run around the Balkans stirring up trouble again. And besides, Kara George was probably the only person alive who could challenge Obrenovic's authority over the Serbian people. Once across the border, Kara George needed a safe place to hide out of sight of Obrenovich's men. So he sent word to his godfather, a fellow former rebel named Vulicevic. Vulicevic suggested a hidden campsite in an oak Grove about 45 miles southeast of Belgrade. But unknown to the fugitive rebel leader, his godfather had switched sides. Vulicevich was an Obrenovich man now. After settling Kara George and Naum in tents in the woods, Vulicevic waited until the early hours of the following morning and then, on orders from his new master, had both men killed Kara George with an axe while he slept in his tent and Naom shot from behind while he fetched water from the stream. The story goes that their heads were sent back to Belgrade, then on to the Sublime Porte, eventually winding up in a museum in Istanbul before being stolen back by nationalist rebels and buried somewhere in Greece. With Karad George gone and the Ottomans in an accommodating mood, Milosh Obrenovic was able to secure the Serbian throne for himself and his descendants for most of the next century. This was a turbulent period. The details aren't relevant here, so let's just hit the major stats. Total Number of Obrenovic 5. Number who took the throne as 3. Longest reign 24 years Shortest 4 weeks Abdications 2 2. Number of sovereigns whose marriages were unhappy enough or unpopular enough or turbulent enough to materially undermine their rule. Three, which is even more impressive because one of the remaining two never got married on account of dying of tuberculosis when he was one of the Obrenovitches. Even had an affair with the Brooklyn born socialite Jeanette Jerome, better known to history as Winston Churchill's mom. That's not a stat, but I wasn't going to miss the opportunity to mention it.
I think the house she grew up in is landmarked.
I think so.
I've walked past it and looked at the little placard.
Also, she was famous for her many, many affairs with important people all over Europe, so it's not like particularly impressive that one of the Obrenoviches was included on the roster somewhere in the Rolodex. Throughout the Obrenovic era, the descendants of Kara George and his supporters remained in the background, usually in some degree of exile. But you will probably not be surprised to hear that they nursed a grudge against the ruling family and occasionally stirred up trouble whenever the opportunity presented itself. The youngest son of Kara George even managed to take and hold the throne for 16 years in the middle of the 19th century, but he refused to involve Serbia in the Crimean War, which proved to be an unpopular decision and led to his ouster and the return of the Obrenovic dynasty to power. However, in 1901 a conspiracy formed within the officer corps to assassinate King Alexander Obrenovich and and his deeply unpopular wife Draga. The conspirators made for a dramatic cast of characters. For one, Queen Draga had been married before and her brother in law from her first marriage was one of the key plotters. Another of the leaders was a 24 year old army officer named Dragutin Dmitrievich. After this, he will create the secret society Unification or Death, better known to history as the Black Hand and best known as those guys who killed the Archduke in 1914. Let me just savor this moment for a second. As a podcaster, it's not often I get to talk about a person's second most momentous regicide.
I guess it got to be a habit.
It's like a can of Pringles. Once you start, you just can't stop. The conspirators twice attempted and failed to kill the royal couple while they were out in public, including one attempt that would have seen the conspirators stabbing them both with cyanide coated knives in the middle of the Queen's own birthday party. This attempt failed because the King and Queen just didn't show up to their own party. So maybe think about that the next time you're deciding whether to bail on a social engagement. After two failures, the conspirators decided they would have to raid the palace itself. The linchpin for this plot would be a young captain in the royal guard and a confidant of the king, Mihailo Naumovich. The assassination was planned for the night of June 10, 1903, when he would be in command of the guard while the king and queen slept. Units of soldiers led by the conspirators fanned out across Belgrade, surrounding and arresting members of the government and officers known to be loyal to the king. At the same time, one of Naumovich's subordinates disabled the electric lights in the palace, and another unlocked the gates for the assassins waiting outside. Most of the palace guards had no idea what was happening and were not in on the conspiracy. There was fierce confused fighting everywhere as the assassins raced from room to room hunting for their target. The whole thing very nearly failed. Dmitrievich himself was shot three times and Naumovich was killed by another conspirator who mistook him for a loyalist. But eventually the assassins discovered the king and queen hiding in their panic room behind a concealed door, and killed them both. Naumovich's betrayal reminds us that even kings are only ever as secure as the loyalties of those who guard them. But perhaps the captain himself did not think it counted as betrayal. Perhaps, from his perspective, he was simply paying back a generation's old debt owed to the whole Obrenovic dynasty. Because, as you might by now have guessed, Naomovich got his name from his grandfather Naum Kara, George's bodyguard, betrayed and murdered on Obrenovich orders 86 years prior. His grandfather's death secured the Obrenovic family's rise. His own brought about their end. When the dust of the assassination settled, the national assembly summoned the patriarch of the Karadjordjevic family back from exile and offered him the crown. He became Peter I, saw Serbia through the horrors of World War I and the unification of the Balkan territories to create what would become Yugoslavia, then died peacefully in 1921. It was his son Alexander, who was assassinated in Marseille 13 years later, and his grandson Peter II, who fled Belgrade ahead of the Axis invasion seven years after that. So the Karadjordjevi's were still pretty new on the job, having occupied the throne for only the past 38 years. They were also very much the kings of the Serbs first and of Yugoslavia second. They were Orthodox Christians and ethnic Serbs, and the story of their Rise to power was inextricable from that of Serbia's own national identity. However much the kings embraced Yugoslavism, however they tried to balance the interests of the different nations within their borders, they would always be seen by the Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Macedonians, Kosovars, Vlaks and all the rest as foreign overlords. Peter II was studying at boarding school in England when his father was killed. He was recalled to Belgrade and finished his education in the palace, while an older cousin, Prince Paul, acted as regent. And it's a real shame that this is not a piece about him, because Paul is as a person, the most interesting Kara Jorgevich to appear in this story. And it isn't even close, but we have a schedule to keep, so we are moving on. Prince Paul was named to the regency by King Alexander in his will, evidently on the principle that the best regent is the person who least wants to be king. Paul probably would have been a good regent in better times. He was loyal to Alexander's memory and he never made any attempt to consolidate power for himself. But his country was in crisis and he had no solutions to offer. Although in fairness to Paul, it was the 1930s and he was not the only European leader who proved inadequate to the moment. In early 1941, he and his government agreed reluctantly and with reservations to join the Axis powers in their Tripartite Pact. This was a real low point for Paul and it would dog him the rest of his life. He wasn't a Nazi himself, not even a sympathizer. But you see, he believed that he had just made a deal that would keep the Empire out of Cloud City for good. The hardliners in the Royal Yugoslav army disagreed and so did their British allies. Two days later, on 27 March, a group of officers with British backing deposed Prince Paul in favor of the now 17 year old king Peter. The coup was bloodless. One of the leading conspirators had warned Paul it was coming and once it began, the Prince Regent responded with the high politics version of yeah, okay, fair enough, good luck in your future endeavors. He left for Greece that night and was eventually settled under house arrest in British Kenya, in the home of an earl who had only just a few months previously been murdered a under dramatic and mysterious circumstances. But we don't have time for that. Nor do we have time to talk about Prince Paul's granddaughter and great granddaughter, the main figures in the 2020 Starz Network documentary Inside the NXIVM Cult. We are not here to have fun. We are here to Learn about history.
We just need, I guess, like another Sirocco type character to crop up in later, Gundam. And then we can start talking about sex cults.
While Prince Paul flew into exile, King Peter was busy accepting the acclamation of his people. Cheering crowds in Belgrade greeted his ascension, eager for a new era under the leadership of their young and energetic king. That new era lasted somewhat less than two weeks, at which point German bombers transformed Belgrade into a sea of flames and rubble, and Peter found himself following his deposed cousin into exile. Peter would later write an account of his life called A King's Heritage. And there's something about the matter of fact way he describes the bombing of Belgrade, that is. By this time, the first wave of bombers was over, and I went to the White palace to get dressed. Everyone had spent the last few hours in pajamas, dressing gowns and overcoats. I had a guard posted on the roof with a trumpet to announce the approach of enemy planes as the siren no longer worked. As I was dressing, the trumpet sounded, and looking from the window, I saw some fighter planes approaching from the south. I put on my overcoat again and my aide de camp entered the room. We are being attacked again, he said. I told him I did not think so, as it was probably our own Messerschmitts arriving to defend the city. We went down to the shelter again, however, but I put my head through the emergency exit to see what was going on. What I saw horrified me. For thinking they were German planes, I our Hurricanes had immediately attacked the Messerschmitts, and there were dogfights going on all around us. It was some time before they identified each other, and the casualties were considerable. This was the fault of the ground control. A few minutes after this unhappy incident, a second wave of bombers escorted by fighters continued the bombing of the city. General Simovich arrived and was shown into the shelter. He had rushed straight from the church where his daughter was getting married to his house, changed quickly and came to the White palace wearing his bedroom slippers as he had had his corns operated on the day before. I immediately asked him for all the news he could give me, but he knew little more than I knew myself. We had been attacked along the border and all communications had been destroyed. Our broadcasting station had received a direct hit early in the raid, and no radio announcements could be made after that. There seemed to be a lull in the bombing, and I went to the Marble palace to collect some clothes and some papers for my study. The road leading to the palace was pitted with craters and was a difficult drive at the palace I found that one bomb had hit the terrace above the main entrance and the door was blocked with debris so we had to enter by the library. Every window was blown in and inside all was chaos with books scattered everywhere. The secret door no longer worked and we had to go via the hall. Here the floor was swollen up with its center shattered. A bomb had come through the ceiling and floor and had exploded in the cellar below. The bedroom had received a direct hit, as had the tunnel where seven guards who had been using it as a shelter had been killed. I put the things I had collected in the car and drove back to the shelter. When a third wave of bombers came over, escorted also by fighters which were machine gunning cars in the streets, I told our chauffeurs to disperse the cars under the trees in the garden in preparation for evacuation. At the shelter I had hot coffee and sandwiches. I wonder when Peter was at the wheel of the royal automobile navigating bomb scarred refugee, choked roads, Belgrade burning in his rearview mirror, if it occurred to him how closely he was following in the 130-year-old footsteps of his great, great grandfather, old Kara George himself. Was he to abandon the capital to a fate as cruel as that inflicted on it by the Ottoman soldiers in Kara George's day? Would he too return to find the country changed? The crowds that had once cheered him now sullen and treacherous. Hustling aboard one of his air force's last surviving planes, Peter made his way first to Greece, then Palestine, Egypt and finally London, where the Yugoslav Royal court and what remained of his government joined the exiled leaders of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Albania. And in the next episode of our Yugoslav Interlude, we'll meet the leading figures of that government in exile and watch as the lot of them go through all five stages of grief on the way to a world historic level. Fumble of the Yugoslavian Bag. Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseated land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dayakson, the closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio and the recap music is window by 1000 hands. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com youm can get in touch with us by email@hostsgundampodcast.com if you'd like to support the show, please tell your friends about us. Leave us a nice review. Wherever you listen to podcasts or if you'd like to support us financially, you can do so@gundampodcast.com Patreon or look for other ways to support the show@gundampodcast.com support most of all, thank you for listening.
I forget. I did, like two different vibes of this. Yeah, one was more like the sports announcer and one was more smooth. Or like, I don't remember what.
One was just more neutral and one was more smooth. Okay, you did do A Sports Announcer 1, but only as a joke. Okay.
And now I just get to be a listener.
Come on. No laugh. I thought that was good.
I mean, it was good, but this is serious business, man.
Which is even more impressive because one of the remaining two never got married on account of dying. On account of dying of n. On account of dying of tubur. On account of dying of tuberculosis when he was 19. I kept trying to say on account of dying of 19 when he was tuberculosis.
Dying of 19 is the most common cause of death for 19 year olds.