Description
He was the commander who led Yugoslavia’s liberation — and then vanished from history.
Born in 1907 in Zavala near Podgorica, shaped by hunger, war and a blinded father’s example, Arso Jovanović rose from gifted cadet and published tactician to become the first Major General of the National Liberation Army and Chief of the Supreme Headquarters, forging a partisan force of brigades, divisions and corps across the whole theatre of war. He defended Sarajevo in April 1941, commanded the July 13 Montenegrin uprising, and led the famous assault on Pljevlja, then organized the army from Foča onward, opened officer training, and directed operations from Jajce and Drvar. For inter-Allied cooperation and wartime merit he was decorated with the Orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov (First Class).
But his path was also one of collision with narrow political interests. Dispatched with Tito’s written authority to rescue the Slovenian front, Jovanović confronted obstruction and intrigue, became a “victim of ideological conformity,” and was missed at critical moments like the Neretva and Sutjeska campaigns. He argued for sound strategy (from Kupres to the eastern theatre), maintained ties with Allied missions and even sat for a three-hour conversation and dinner with Stalin — before his story ended, officially on the Yugoslav-Romanian border in August 1948, though no fewer than twenty-nine possible versions of his death exist. Arso Jovanović: Commander of All Yugoslavia and Martyr of the Revolution is Ivan Matović’s concise companion to the larger work, restoring, from original records and testimony, the soldier who bound a mosaic of peoples into an army, shoulder to shoulder with their Russian liberators — and paid for it with his life.