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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.

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Welcome back to Mobile Suit Breakdown's Yugoslavia Interlude. This week's episode marks the end of what to me is the first act of this story, the crucial events that set Yugoslavia on the course it would hold through the bulk of the Cold War and the remainder of Marshal Tito's life. That makes this a good time to take a step back and check in with the Gundam of it all. It's well and good to say that you have to understand Yugoslavia to understand Victory Gundam, but Victory Gundam grows smaller in our rear view mirror with each passing day. Is it still worth spending all this time on a country that officially dissolved before the release of episode 9 of Stardust Memory? Does Yugoslavia still matter to the Gundam of the later 90s? Well, yes. Tomino Yoshiyuki was born late in 1941, just over a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Araki Yoshihisa, who wrote for many of Tomino's early series, including eight episodes of First Gundam, was born even earlier in 1939. Fellow First Gundam writer Hoshiyama Hiroyuki, who wrote 11 episodes, and background art director Nakamura Mitsuki were both born in the spring of 44, a month before the Imperial carrier fleet was annihilated at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Writer Yamamoto yu, also with 11 episodes to his name, was born at the end of 1946, while Mecha designer Okawara Kunio and character designer Yasuhiko Yoshikazu were both born in December 47, just two years into the American occupation. The older members of this generation experienced the catastrophic end of World War II in their own persons, and the younger ones grew up in a defeated nation. The landscape of their early years was composed of shattered buildings and broken men. They grew up hearing about the war from those who had lived it. Older children trained to fight a last ditch guerrilla campaign against potential American landing parties. Mentors like Tezuka Osamu and Takahata Isao, who had narrowly survived air raids. Fathers and older brothers who fought. Tomino's father, we know, was a chemical engineer who worked on flight suits for Imperial pilots, and through him, a young Tomino learned about the chemical weapons atrocities committed by Imperial engineers in China long before they were known to the general public. In short, while there's a lot more going on in First Gundam than a simple retelling of World War II, it is very much a story about that kind of war. From the perspective of a child, it is in some ways a redemptive fantasy in which three Japanese teenagers, Kai Shiden, Hayato Kobayashi and Amuro Rei, abandoned by the older generation, fight a righteous war against the embodiment of all the old empire's horrors and triumph over them. We would not have been taken in by the propaganda, the creators seem to be saying. If we had been older, our generation would have been on the right side of history. But from the 80s, Tomino's focus shifted to more immediate conflicts. The titans of Zeta have more in common with the French paratroopers and foreign legionnaires who fought in Algeria the and then tried to overthrow De Gaulle's government to prevent him making peace than they do with the Nazi ss. The Grips and Neo Zeon wars in Zeta and Double Zeta draw their inspirations from the internal conflicts that consumed the decades after the end of World War II. The troubles in Northern Ireland, the dirty war in Basque country, the years of lead in Italy, the Salvadoran Civil War, the disappearances in Pinochet's Chile. But by the 90s, Japan's whole attitude towards war was changing. The post war orthodoxy, which had defined Japan as a peaceful nation without an army, was fragmenting. Younger generations who had only ever known an increasingly prosperous nation secure within the American military umbrella, understood war to be a thing that happened in the nebulis, over there, across the waters, to those people, not us. And at the same time, the war generation was disappearing from public life, taking with it the most persuasive advocates for national pacifism. The government embarked on what would prove to be a gradual, step by step expansion of the Self Defense force's capabilities. In 1991, Japanese troops deployed for their first overseas military action since the surrender as Japanese minesweepers sailed for the Persian Gulf to participate in the US led Gulf War. The following year, Japanese ground forces landed in Cambodia to act as peacekeepers, an event that inspired the opening to Oshi Imamoru's Patlabor 2. I won't go into Patlabor 2 here, except to say that if first Gundam is the quintessential post war anime, then Patlabor 2, released in 1993, is its post post war counterpart. All the collective anxiety about Japan's relationship to war and its reliance on the might of the United States distilled down to 113 minutes of animation. The nature of war was changing. The nature of the world was changing. The Soviet Union had fallen. Japan was forced to ask itself questions about its role in the world and Its relationship to violence that had for decades seemed settled. The teams making G Gundam and its immediate successors had no personal lived experience of war and the national consensus that war is an unparalleled evil to be avoided at any cost, the ruin of men and nations, the grave of hope and ambition. This consensus, which they might once have fallen back upon, had now been replaced by a question, a curiosity. What is war? How does it happen? What will become of us if we continue to deny it? Will it happen to us whether we want it or not? They cannot but have looked to the Yugoslav wars, viewed through the warm glow of the TV screen and the comforting remove of the nightly news, for answers to those questions. You can read those questions under the surface. When Tomino talks about using the Yugoslav wars for a reference, he wanted to understand which levers religious fervor, personal charisma, nationalism inserted into which fault lines poverty, corruption, ambition could make a seemingly stable country tear itself apart. After all, he lived in a seemingly stable country. G Gundam imagines a world in which a every nation has followed Japan's path, limiting their armies and forswearing offensive war. Like Japan, they've traded away the nation's traditional power of unilateral action for the collective security of a stable international order. But the fault lines are still there, and a new war is never that far away, never quite as unthinkable as one would like it to be. A supranational body like the United Colonies might hold the chaos at Bay for 50 or 60 or 100 years, only to collapse overnight, as had the concert of Europe, the Soviet Union and, yes, Yugoslavia. How does that happen? How does it all come tumbling down? And what horrors might be unleashed if it does? The history of Yugoslavia offers answers to those questions, and I suppose we'll all find them together at the end of this road. But for now, let's jump back to 1945. The Communists have won their landslide victory in the November elections. And not to spoil things too much for you, they are going to hold on to the country. Right up until the Release of Gundam F91. To the outside world, they looked like the ideal model of a new communist state. They had won their freedom by their own hands mostly, and had come to power in a democratic ish election. They moved quickly to institute socialism at every level of society while rebuilding their shattered nation as they built new factories, new schools and new soccer stadiums. They also built a new kind of citizen and a new kind of society, one that was to be more equal, more fair, more prosperous and happier than what had come before. The Yugoslavs were loyal allies of the Soviet Union and good friends to their communist neighbors in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. The industrial economy they were rebuilding was designed to integrate smoothly into the sprawling, interconnected economic megastructure of the Soviet bloc. They supported the communist rebels in neighboring Greece, sent technical advisors to struggling Albania and kept up a relentless stream of anti Western, pro Soviet propaganda. Tito, their charismatic leader, was a war hero, an icon and a model for communist leaders everywhere. He was a protege of Stalin and some even spoke of him being the old man's heir. Then, on March 27th, 1948, Stalin dispatched a letter to the Yugoslavs denouncing Tito and his closest allies as dubious Marxists. And he called on all correct Yugoslav Communists to oust their chief and submit fully to Soviet authority. They refused. A flurry of activity, more letters, party conferences, counter denunciations, arrests. That June, the common form, the International association of Communist Parties, which was headquartered in Belgrade, expelled Yugoslavia. All of the other communist parties in Europe turned away from them. Even the Communist Party of Greece, which was at this time almost entirely dependent on Yugoslav aid for its survival, and which Stalin himself had abandoned, sided with the Soviet leader against their patron. Stalin seized this moment to purge so called Titoists wherever he found them. Some of these really were Tito's allies, but plenty more were just targets of convenience communist leaders throughout Europe who were considered insufficiently subservient to the Soviet Union. In Yugoslavia, Tito too conducted wide ranging purges of Soviet sympathizers within his party. Perhaps as many as 50,000 of them, including some of its highest ranking members, imprisoning them in camps built on rocky uninhabited islands off the Dalmatian coast. The neighboring communist countries, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, all closed their borders massing troops nearby and began erecting large scale fortifications. More than a dozen Yugoslav soldiers were killed in border incidents and there was real fear that a Soviet invasion was looming. The historical evidence is somewhat ambiguous, but it may well have been. In any event, saboteurs slipped across the border to destroy Yugoslav infrastructure. And in August, a trio of high ranking Yugoslav military officers attempted to launch a coup against Tito. Though when this failed, they fled for the border where one was killed and the others arrested. The Yugoslavs, only a few years removed from the horrors of the Axis occupation, began to prepare to be invaded again from every direction and by a vastly superior enemy. Irregular partisan formations were reactivated and plans were made for guerrilla warfare in the event that the regular army was forced to abandon large parts of the country. How had this come to pass? The Next, I think, couple of Yugoslavia interlude episodes will go through the sequence of events that led to this breach and the consequences in the aftermath. Stalin's betrayal deprived Yugoslavia of its ideological mentor, all its most important trading partners, its most powerful ally, and its sense of place in the world. It became a strange beast, a Communist nation in Europe, practically friendless, threatened by the Eastern Bloc, reliant on American and British aid, yet devoted to Marxism and determined not to be anyone's puppet. Freed of Soviet domination, faced with unique challenges, they would develop their own individual form of communism and reject the Cold War binary. All of that will make up the next act of this story. And while Tito will remain at center stage, the the other Yugoslav protagonists who have played such a large role in our story so far. The Croatian Peasant Party, the Royalists, the fascists, the Ustasha, the Chetniks, the King and his family. They will never again be in a position to influence events within the country. The music has stopped, and each must, with greater or lesser dignity, make their bows and depart. Today let us follow their stories to their conclusions. Already in his mid-60s, by the end of the war, Vladko Maciek, leader of the Croatian Peasant Party and former vice premier of Yugoslavia, was unable to reconcile himself to Communist rule and, fearing reprisal for his role in transferring power to the USTAE government, fled first to France and then to the United States, where he joined the country's large Croatian emigre community. Despite his age, he remained politically active as one of the leaders of the International Peasant Union, which aspired to be an agrarian counterweight to Communism in Eastern Europe, but was in practice a kind of retirement home for exiled Peasant Party leaders hanging out in the United States with next to no on the ground influence. Maciek died in his Washington, D.C. home in 1964 at the age of 84. His two children remained in the United States, and at least as of 2011, when his daughter Agnes passed away, his grandchildren and great grandchildren were mostly still living in and around Washington. Maciek was remembered in his home country, and in 1996, after the end of the Communist regime, his remains were repatriated to Croatia and reburied with honor. Ivan Ubai, the Ban of Croatia and the last prime minister appointed by King Peter, was only 53 when the Communists took over Yugoslavia, but his health was already poor. He left government before the 1945 election and retired to live privately in Zagreb, where he died 10 years later. The USTAA leader and Hitler wannabe Ante Pavelic had not possessed the courage to stay and fight for his regime once the odds turned decisively against them. Nor did he follow his idol by ending his own life. On May 8, 1945, the German High Command surrendered unconditionally to the Allies and issued a stand down order to all forces under their command, including the German troops still fighting in Yugoslavia and the Croatian army, which had been operating under German control throughout the war. They had clear orders to surrender themselves to the partisans immediately. But fearing reprisal for all the atrocities they had committed, the German regional commander ignored the surrender order and attempted to fight his way across the border into ally occupied Austria. Pavelic ordered his Croatian troops to do the same. Which is why. Trivia Question Alert the last battle of World War II in Europe was fought between Yugoslav and Croatian troops. Almost a month after VE Day, Pavelic's government also made a break for the Austrian border. They were caught en route and imprisoned by the partisans. But Pavelic himself was not among them. He had taken a small group, including his son and two drivers on a different route, probably as part of a prearranged escape plan. Before coming to power in 41, he had spent decades as the head of an international terrorist conspiracy and he knew well how to avoid detection by the authorities. Reportedly, he disguised himself as a Catholic priest and spent some time hiding out in an Austrian monastery until the heat had died down a little, and then, possibly with the assistance of the Vatican, fled to Italy en route to a comfortable exile in Argentina. His family joined him there shortly thereafter and he was employed by the Peron government under an assumed name. He even tried to rally other escaped USTAA's to form a Croatian government in exile, though they never made much progress in their plots to overthrow tito. Then in 1957, someone, probably a former Yugoslav Royal army officer turned Montenegrin Chetnik turned Argentinian hotel operator recognized Pavelic and shot him in the back at a bus stop. He survived the shooting, but his identity was revealed while he was in the hospital. By this point, the Perons had fallen from power and the new government had little interest in protecting the former Ustasha leader. Still, Pavelic was a slippery fish. Within two weeks before he could be extradited back to Yugoslavia to stand trial, he slipped across the border to Chile and then to asylum in Franco Spain. But his wounds from the shooting never healed properly and he died two years later in Madrid. Now the Serbs first. What about King Peter? Unlike everyone else on this list, he was still a very young man, just starting his life when the Communists took over. At 22, with a wife he loved and a newborn son. He had plenty of time to come to terms with his altered circumstances. His wife, Alexandra, had spent most of her life thus far as a princess in exile, and she had done all right. But Peter couldn't give it up. He could never accept the fall of his dynasty. He moved to the United States and became active in the Serbian exile community there. But he was more a pawn in their squabbles than any kind of a leader. He settled in Chicago, where a large Serbian American community could support him and made the kind of public appearances that you would expect from a minor celebrity past his prime. And yet he continued to fantasize about leading an army of exiles and Chetnik rebels to overthrow the Communists. He spent money like a king, even though his only income came from the voluntary gifts of royalist exiles, and he quickly ran up enormous debts. He was cruel to his wife and drank excessively. In 1970, when he was just 47 years old, his liver failed and he died. I think Peter could have lived a good life after the war. Reading his autobiography, it becomes apparent that he had a consuming passion for flying. He describes the experience of operating an airplane in rapturous terms. Surely he could have found employment and satisfaction as a pilot, or if that did not suit his dignity, then perhaps a role in the business of airplane manufacture. He certainly did not lack for connections, but he was born to be king, and he was a sentimentalist, stubbornly attached to his impossible fantasies. You know who did live a good life after the war, though? Prince Paul in the magnificent Tuscan villa that he inherited from his adopted mother. But this piece still isn't about him. Nor is it about his close friend and neighbor, the esteemed, infamous, and perhaps fraudulent art historian Bernard Berenson. We still don't have time for them. This piece is still about the fates of Tito's rivals. Speaking of which, General Dushan Simovich, demonstrating the, let's say, remarkable political flexibility that had defined his career thus far, reconciled himself to the Communist state, at least enough to support the National Liberation Front, of which they were part, and returned to live in Belgrade in 1945. He had already retired from active service by this point, and he spent his remaining years writing on military matters, passing away in 1962. I've joked a few times that he is like the Forrest Gump of Yugoslav history, all always managing to be on hand and participating in the big moments. Well, he managed it one more time before his death. In the last months of the war, Chetnik leader Drazha Mihailovi had been abandoned by many of his closest allies and most reliable lieutenants. He had established his base in the mountains of north central Bosnia, a region still garrisoned by his German allies. The Germans were falling back everywhere, but Mihailovi was blindly optimistic, apparently misinterpreting their delaying actions for the first movements of a major new offensive. The other Chetniks had a much more realistic view of the situation and believed, correctly, that they could either run now or miss the opportunity altogether. The bulk of them chose to flee west and north into USTAA territory. But there they were betrayed by the local Chetnik commander allied with the ustaa, who now fell upon the retreating column, capturing and massacring its leaders and many of the civilians accompanying them. Mihailovich, having avoided this trap through dumb luck, essentially, was nonetheless left exposed as the Germans pulled the last of their forces out of Bosnia in April 1945, he resolved to push east with his remaining troops, about 12,000 men, though many of them sick and wounded, into the traditional Chetnik stronghold of Serbia. The people there, Mihailovi believed, were on the verge of a mass uprising against the partisans. Throughout their long march, they were dogged by small partisan units and periodically strafed by the partisan air force. In May, on the banks of the Neretva river, near the spot where the Chetniks had tried and failed to annihilate Tito's retreating column two years earlier, the partisans struck in force and decimated the Chetniks. The survivors scattered in smaller groups, which were systematically hunted down. Drazha's group was caught on May 21, surrounded and all but wiped out. Only the leader himself and 17 of his men managed to escape. But somehow this tiny group managed to evade their pursuers, and Drazha was able to catch his breath in the forests of eastern Bosnia. He and his men even managed to steal a boat and make their way secretly across the river to Serbia, as they had intended. But there they found the population hostile and no other Chetniks waiting for them. So they got back in their boat and retreated to the relative safety of the Bosnian forest, where they went to ground. He remained there for nearly a year until the Communist secret police, osna, and a captured Chetnik commander, willing to turn code on anyone if it meant saving himself, began a concerted effort to bring him in. That defector, a man named Kalebich, led a team of OSNA agents to the general area where Drazha was known to be hiding. The agents were disguised as Chetniks, a process that apparently mainly involved growing a beard, which was the Chetnik fashion at the time. Once in the area, they began attempting to make contact through the local peasants. The pitch was that this hiding spot would not remain safe much longer, and the Chetnik leader would be much safer returning with Kalabich and his officers to their stronghold in Serbia. Though the real Chetnik guards were suspicious of this new arrival and his freshly bearded entourage. Eventually one of his letters made it through the cordon to the chief himself, and Mihailovi, always ready to believe good news, convinced himself that Kalebich was legit and his suggestion wise. By now it was March of 1946. Kalebich convinced Drazha to send about half of his guards away in the opposite direction as a diversionary tactic, which entirely coincidentally, I'm sure reduced his forces to roughly equal that of the OSNA agents. They then set off marching at night in single file, alternating, so that every real Chetnik had a disguised security agent walking behind him. Then, at a pre arranged signal, each OSNA man killed the Chetnik in front of him, and Drazha was dragged off in chains to Belgrade, where he was tried for treason and war crimes alongside two dozen other Chetniks, then sentenced to death, executed by firing squad and buried in an unmarked grave. And Dushan Simovich was one of the witnesses for the prosecution who testified against the Chetnik commander, who he had once upon a time appointed to his cabinet. That's it for today. We will return to G Gundam properly next week. But before I go, I want to tell you about an exciting new project. And no, I don't mean the Disappearances of Lydia Fontaine Audio drama new episodes available every Sunday at lydiadisappears.com and on all fine podcast apps. No, this is completely different. See, I recently heard from Tim Eldred, whose name may be familiar to you, as one of America's famous foremost Leiji Matsumoto fans, or as the man who breached containment and unleashed Doozybots on an unsuspecting world, or for his work as a comics artist and animation director. Either way, Tim has been tapped by a film production company called Creator VC to write and direct a documentary, Icons of Anime, about the early days of international anime fandom, covering the shows and movies that first sparked anime fandom outside of Japan, and talking to prominent figures from that first generation of fans while they're still alive. That last bit is part of why I'm telling you about this project. To be clear, this little segment is not sponsored at all. I want to see this thing succeed. I'm fascinated by the early history of fandom. Whenever we cover a series, I'm always trying to figure out how it was received. What were people writing about G Gundam in the fanzines of 94? What were they seeing? What were the tapes like? Who was out there cosplaying as Domon and Raine in 1994? But we're now at the point where people from that generation are retiring or passing away. To the extent that fandom is a community, or at least a subculture, I want it to be the kind that remembers its forebears. I figure if you listen to msb, you're at least a little bit interested in fandom history too. I've been wanting to do something like what Tim is proposing, albeit on a smaller scale, for the Gundam fandom specifically for some time now, and so I'm really excited to see someone else blazing that trail. The project is still in its early phases and some elements of the scope and focus are still being decided. They're looking for input and to gauge interest. I think the company putting up the money for the project wants to see a certain level of interest before they actually commit to doing it. So if you are at all interested in seeing icons of anime happen, then go to iconsofanimedoc.com and fill in the survey. I just did it today while I was writing this. It will take under five minutes unless you think way too much about some of your answers. Again, that is iconsofanime doc.com and when they ask you which shows you specifically want them to cover, make sure you list the Vision of Escobar. Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded 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. 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@hostsundompodcast.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@gundumpodcast.com Patreon or look for other ways to support the show@gundumpodcast.com support most of all. Thank you for listening.

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