How Anzacs became the forgotten heroes of a Balkans war

Ronald Jones, a young man from the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, believed he held one of the most urgent secrets of World War II.

He had to deliver his secret to Britain’s leaders, he was sure, if he were to save the lives of possibly millions of communist Partisans, Croats, Muslims, Roman Catholics and others.

Jones, however, was trapped in Serbia in a brutal civil war within the greater world war, the unwilling guest of the leader of the royalist Chetnik forces, General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović.

What had been the Kingdom of Yugoslavia since the 1920s had dissolved under the occupation of Hitler’s military and its Axis partners, Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

The result was among the most fractured, violent and confusing regions of a wider world itself broken asunder.

Jones wasn’t the only Australian adrift in this dangerous cauldron, where shifting allegiances, betrayal and massacres were constant perils.

In the south of Serbia, a young miner from Castlemaine, Ross Sayers, was among a handful of other Australians who, like Jones, had escaped from Nazi captivity by jumping into Balkan territory from the hell of trains transporting them from Greece to Germany. Some of them would be murdered and others recaptured.

Sayers, drafted on the threat of execution into the service of a hot-blooded Chetnik commander named Major Dragutin Keserović, risked his own life several times to save both comrades and strangers from execution, and buried some of them he couldn’t save, including two fellow Australians.

But Jones and Sayers, with no way home, remained in occupied Yugoslavia – Jones for more than 18 months, Sayers for almost three years.

Both became spies. Sayers secretly became an agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), formed to conduct espionage and sabotage in German-occupied Europe and to aid resistance movements.

Jones, also operating alongside an SOE agent, built up his own haunting store of secrets about the leader of the Chetniks, Draža Mihailović. The Chetniks, Jones saw, spent more time fighting the communist Partisans than the Germans despite begging for supplies from Britain. Mihailović pleaded he didn’t want to provoke German massacres against the civilian population.

It is unlikely you have heard of the two Victorian heroes.

Raised in pinched circumstances during the Great Depression, neither was schooled beyond the age of 13.

And yet, in the distant fastness of Serbia’s mountains, valleys and high meadows, they learnt to speak Serbian and lived by their wits, figuring out how to survive a civil war within a war that took countless lives, often in the cruellest ways.

Separately, too, they witnessed atrocities against men, women and children that remain lodged in the collective memory of the people and heritage organisations of today’s Balkan countries.

Both men eventually made it home to Australia where, after briefly becoming subjects of media interest, they locked away their memories and their trauma for the rest of their lives.

In the last 40 years of Jones’ life, he spoke not a word of what he endured in Serbia.

Sayers refused to march on Anzac Day and became angry and fearful as immigrant Chetnik supporters paraded under their old flags through Australian streets among Anzac veterans.

We are learning their stories now, in great and confronting detail, thanks to a new book, Anzac Guerillas, by Canberra-based historian Edmund Goldrick.

Goldrick spent almost four years undertaking the most comprehensive research into the lives, the soldiering and the spying of Jones, Sayers and some of their fellow escapees.

His searching took him through archives in Australia, the United Kingdom, Serbia, the modern former Yugoslavia, Germany and the United States. His book’s bibliography extends for 12 closely typed pages.

The result is a book that reads almost like a first-person adventure story, though Jones and Sayers and all the other Australians Goldrick mentions had died well before he began his research.

One of the techniques he employed to achieve such vividness was to reconstruct the details buried in old intelligence and military reports, not just about the features of a battle or a massacre, but about the physical circumstances existing at each crucial moment of the narrative.

British and German military planners, for instance, maintained exhaustive reports on weather conditions relating to battlefields and supply drops. Goldrick even studied the seasons and the phases of the moon from these times, and the geography of the areas he wrote about.

Thus, when he was able to match up dates, he could refer to the guerillas marching through snow on a moonlit night, or in deep darkness when the moon had set or when cloud obscured a hillside or a valley.

Within Goldrick’s sprawling and endlessly fascinating chronicle is the secret that drove Jones to survive until he could deliver it to the Allies.

The secret, according to Jones’ resultant written testimony, which Goldrick found, was that Mihailović himself had told Jones that he planned to wait until the war was over and then to “clean” Greater Serbia of all but ethnic Serbians. These days we’d call it genocide.

But how could Jones warn the British?

Jones, a lieutenant promoted from the ranks in Australia’s 2/8th Battalion, had come a long way since he was taken prisoner on Crete and then escaped the Germans.

He was initially taken in by generous Serbian peasants who provided food and safety, which enabled him to recuperate after the desperate deprivations of imprisonment by the Germans in Greece.

His health restored, Jones set off on foot in the hope of finding a way to reunite with Australian troops in Egypt.

Soon, however, he and a fellow escapee he came across on the road, an English officer named Maurice Vitou, were held up by a roving band of Partisans who placed them on trial as spies, or “fifth columnists”. The penalty for such activity was death.

Strange fate intervened. A Chetnik officer accompanied by an armed escort arrived and led Jones and Vitou away.

At that early stage of the war, the Partisans and Chetniks observed a form of alliance against German invaders. The Partisans simply handed over Jones and Vitou as a goodwill gesture to the Chetniks.

They were taken to the mountain redoubt of Draža Mihailović.

Mihailović, it turned out, believed Jones and Vitou would have the codes that would make it easier for him to radio the Allies with requests for supplies. They didn’t, but Mihailović chose to keep them by his side as guerilla soldiers.

‘His idea of “cleaning the country” as he called it, was firstly to eliminate the Partisans and then the Croats,  [Muslims], Bulgarians, Romanians and all Roman Catholics in the country.’

Ronald Jones’ written testimony after his time with General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović

By mid-1942, Jones had seen and heard enough of Mihailović and the bloody civil war.

He set off, burdened by his secret. He was promptly arrested by Italian soldiers. He was interrogated under torture and dumped in the first of three prisoner-of-war camps that would hold him until he escaped again, this time in northern Italy from yet another German train after Italy had capitulated.

In November 1943, Jones, aided by three Italian mountain troops heading home themselves, staggered into Switzerland.

He sat down to write, believing he might be the only Allied prisoner to make it out of Yugoslavia alive.

He unloaded everything that had happened to him since his first escape from the Germans and through his experiences with Mihailović.

“During the time that I was with him we had many discussions regarding the fate of Yugoslavia and its future after the war,” Jones wrote.

“He was never very interested in there being a Yugoslavia as a union of the Slav peoples who lived in the country, but considered the Serbs were the only people that had any right to live in the country.

“... His idea of ‘cleaning the country’ as he called it, was firstly to eliminate the Partisans and then the Croats, [Muslims], Bulgarians, Romanians and all Roman Catholics in the country.”

Ronald Jones had unburdened himself.

He concluded his intelligence report by declaring that Mihailović “was not worthy of the assistance granted him by Great Britain and that a better result would have been obtained in granting that assistance to the Partisans”.

Within a month, Britain decided to dump Mihailović and his Chetniks and officially support the Partisans.

Ronald Jones believed he had been vindicated.

The less glorious truth, Goldrick ascertained, was that Jones’ report had been read by few.

Britain’s decision to change sides in Yugoslavia was driven by the fact that Germany’s secret codes had finally been broken by the Ultra project. German transmissions, decoded, made it clear Mihailović and his Chetniks had been collaborating and that the Partisans were the only guerillas feared by Axis forces.

Sayers and his fellow spies knew it was now too dangerous to stay with the Chetniks. Guaranteed safe conduct by the Partisans, they were evacuated to Italy.

Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans were the victors of the war, and Tito’s communist dictatorship of Yugoslavia lasted 35 years until his death in 1980.

Mihailović was tried in 1946 by the communist authorities for high treason and war crimes, found guilty and put to death.

He was officially rehabilitated by a Serbian court in 2015.

Ronald Jones, double agent and deliverer of a secret that almost killed him, disappeared from the Australian story.

Ross Sayers eventually retired with his wife Mavis to the coastal Gippsland village of Loch Sport. They died together in a boating accident in1982. Loch Sport has dedicated a park as the Ross Sayers Reserve.

Anzac Guerillas by Edmund Goldrick is published by Hachette Australia.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.