The Forgotten 500 (38 page)

Buoyed by growing public sympathy, Felman and nineteen other rescued airmen, along with two Canadians, chartered a DC-3, the civilian version of the same C-47 that had rescued the men in Pranjane. On April 28, 1946, they flew to Washington, DC. They dubbed their trip the “Mission to Save Mihailovich,” which was stenciled on the side of the plane. They made stops in Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh to pick up more airmen from their communities, posing at each airport for the local press. The papers ran pictures of sharply dressed young men in suits and fedoras, waving to the camera from the steps leading into the airplane, with captions such as TEN FLIERS RESCUED BY CHETNIK LEADER STOP IN DETROIT.

Having skillfully publicized their journey to Washington ahead of time, the delegation’s plane was met at the Washington airport by more than two thousand supporters who cheered and waved signs supporting Mihailovich. Police motorcycles escorted the group to their hotel in Washington, and there the men immediately set off on their rounds. Splitting up and visiting as many politicians and bureaucrats as they could, the airmen tried to convince Washington leaders that Mihailovich should be acknowledged for his efforts in saving the forgotten 500. Felman and other members sought a meeting with acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson but were refused. They visited with other State Department officials and asked for help in going to Yugoslavia to testify on behalf of Mihailovich, insisting that the story of Operation Halyard must be heard if Mihailovich had any chance at all of getting a fair trial. Dozens of airmen were willing to get on a plane at any moment and fly back to Yugoslavia to testify, but they could not go without an invitation from Tito, and the only way to get that was through the State Department.

Not surprisingly, considering its past involvement with Tito and Mihailovich, the State Department said no. Even sending information about Operation Halyard to Tito, or publicizing it for the whole world to see, was out of the question, the airmen were told. The State Department refused to forward the documentation offered by the committee, consisting mostly of the airmen’s own personal accounts in Yugoslavia, to Tito. All government records documenting Operation Halyard were classified, so the only credit for Mihailovich’s actions would come from the airmen themselves, and the State Department would do nothing to help them get to Yugoslavia.

The airmen did receive considerable press coverage of their trip to Washington, which helped raise public awareness that the case against Mihailovich was, at a minimum, not as certain as Tito claimed. In one article Nick Lalich delivered a copy of his own Legion of Merit citation to the
Washington Post
to prove that he had performed heroically in Yugoslavia during Operation Halyard and arguing that in his five months with Mihailovich he had never seen any evidence of betrayal. Lalich described the Yugoslav general as a “good-humored, regular guy and accomplished scholar.” The reporter, however, noted that the citation said Lalich was with Tito’s Partisans during this time, not Mihailovich. Lalich explained he had vigorously protested that inaccuracy when presented with the citation, but senior officers told him to “forget it or he’d get into trouble.”

“I’m not going to forget it,” Lalich told the reporter. “And I’ll do all I can to get Mihailovich a decent break. He’s getting a raw deal. He is not and never was a Nazi collaborator. The proof is in the frontline intelligence reports, if the army will make them public.”

The army wouldn’t.

 

 

 

Before the visit to Washington
ended, acting Secretary of State Acheson changed his mind and agreed to meet with a representative of the airmen’s group. Mike McKool, the Dallas, Texas, airman nicknamed Tom Mix by the Serbs, and by this time a law student at Southern Methodist University, was chosen to meet with Acheson. After talking for thirty-seven minutes, Acheson assured McKool that the United States would make a strong appeal to Yugoslavia to give Mihailovich a fair trial.

While in Washington, the committee members also sought a meeting with President Truman. The president declined. Working through their senators and congressmen, they had to be satisfied with having a resolution entered into the congressional report of May 1, 1946:

Though the delegation returned to
New York disappointed, the airmen continued their campaign, asking for three things: Let the airmen speak at the trial, allow OSS personnel to testify about Mihailovich, and move the trial to another country where he could get a fair hearing. Felman, Jibilian, Wilson, Orsini, and all the other men were just simple citizens or military personnel at this point, with no power but what they might muster under a democratic society. They persevered because they had faith that citizens of a free nation could stop an injustice being perpetrated halfway around the world. Their experience in the war had taught them exactly that.

The effort did yield results. Shortly after the trip to Washington, the State Department followed through on Acheson’s promise and sent a letter to Tito stating:

Tito’s reply was swift and clear. He had no interest in hearing from the American airmen. The
Christian Science Monitor
on April 13, 1946, reported that, “Belgrade has curtly turned down Washington’s request that these men in the interest of justice be allowed to present their evidence. Its reason: It does not want to influence the court.” The reason was laughable to anyone who knew how much the court was already influenced in the extreme by Tito and Stalin. The report went on to explain that, “The Tito government caps its rejection of Washington’s request with the amazing statement that General Mihailovich’s crimes are too terrible to permit the question of his innocence to be raised.” The message from Tito stated that, “The crimes committed by Mihailovich are too great and terrible for any discussions to take place on whether or not he is guilty.”

Aided by such blatant confirmation that the trial was merely a formality before execution, public sentiment was building in favor of the airmen and Mihailovich. Americans were already leery of the growing Communist presence in Europe, and no one in the United States seemed to have a good feeling about Tito, not even the State Department, which failed to embrace him even as it officially shunned Mihailovich. Anti-Communist feelings, coupled with respect for the returning war veterans who were sometimes moved to tears in their defense of this foreign leader, created a growing concern that Yugoslavia was being allowed to railroad an innocent man. A long list of prominent citizens, including numerous state governors, senators, congressmen, and judges formed the Committee for the Fair Trial to General Mihailovich, building on the airmen’s own efforts to push for U.S. intervention before Mihailovich was executed by his sworn enemy. The executive vice president of the committee was Ray Brock, previously a foreign correspondent for the
New York Times,
and one of those who, years earlier, defended Vujnovich from the Ustashe guard who wanted to execute him if he didn’t produce his passport. Soon after its formation, the committee announced that prominent attorney Morris L. Ernst had volunteered to defend Mihailovich, intending to fly to Europe immediately in an effort to contact Tito.

By this time, the British role in the betrayal of Mihailovich also was emerging. In the
New York World-Telegram
on April 19, 1946, a headline read CHURCHILL WAS TAKEN IN BY TITO, WRITER CLAIMS. The writer was David Martin, already known as the foremost scholar on Yugoslav history and active in the movement to save Mihailovich. He told the newspaper that although Churchill did not conspire to hand Yugoslavia over to Communism and acted in good faith, “His mistake was in treating Tito as an English gentleman.” Martin also quoted Churchill as telling a Brussels, Belgium, newspaper that his handling of Yugoslavia was his biggest mistake of the war. In 1946, the influence of Communist spies and moles like James Klugmann was yet to be discovered or fully appreciated.

As public outrage grew at the prospect of a show trial in Belgrade, the State Department sent another letter to Tito, requesting that the airmen’s story be allowed into evidence. Stanoje Simic, the Yugoslav minister of foreign affairs, responded by informing the State Department that the airmen would not be heard. Any further communication on the matter would be ignored, Simic reported.

Realizing that Tito would not allow the Americans to participate in Mihailovich’s trial, the Committee for the Fair Trial organized the next-best thing—an investigation commission that would hear all the evidence in the United States and then forward it on to Tito whether he wanted it or not. The airmen eagerly lined up to testify before the commission, knowing that it might be the only way they could ever get their story on the record. In the interest of time, however, the commission heard from twenty airmen and OSS officers who had direct contact with Mihailovich and his guerillas. The airmen included Felman and McKool, and the written testimonies of three hundred more airmen also were accepted. Then the commission heard from six OSS officers who personally had worked with Mihailovich, including Musulin, Lalich, Rajacich, and Jibilian. To a man, every single person testified that they had never seen any indication that Mihailovich collaborated with the Germans.

After a week of testimony, the commission forwarded a six-hundred-page report to Tito. As expected, Tito’s government completely ignored it.

 

 

 

The trial of General Draza
Mihailovich began on June 10, 1946, in a makeshift courtroom, the auditorium of an infantry school in the Belgrade suburbs that had been rigged with floodlights. The outsized venue was necessary to hold the more than one thousand spectators and one hundred foreign and Yugoslav journalists. Tito returned from a trip to Moscow in time to be present for the trial of his rival. Mihailovich entered the courtroom unaided but looking weary and weak, stepping carefully to the defendant’s dock because his nearsightedness had recently grown much more severe, nearly to the point of blindness. Thirteen other defendants stood in the dock with him, also on trial for collaborating with the enemy during the war. Ten more were tried in ab sentia, including Fotić, the former Yugoslav ambassador to the United States who had recently detailed Operation Halyard in the
Washington Post
. The indictment accused Fotić of organizing “large-scale propaganda, fully aware that Mihailovich and his Chetniks, with their organization, were collaborating with the occupiers.”

Collaborating with the enemy was the main charge against Mihailovich. The indictment claimed that in August 1944, the same month that the Operation Halyard rescues began, Mihailovich met with an American officer and the chief of the administrative staff of the Nazi military command in Serbia. That meeting was but one example of ongoing collaboration with the Germans and Italians in an effort to defeat the Partisans led by Tito, the indictment claimed. And in a clear example of how the victors write history, the indictment went on to condemn Mihailovich for the very act of fighting the Partisans, describing the Chetnik resistance to the Communists as if it were treason
per se
. The Americans and the British were not spared criticism in the indictment even though Tito probably would not have been in a position to try Mihailovich without the support of the Allies during the war. The American and British governments, Tito claimed in the indictment, conspired with Mihailovich and King Peter’s exiled government to defeat the Partisans, again describing resistance to the Communist movement as inherently criminal.