Description
He was the commander who led Yugoslavia’s liberation — and then vanished from history.
Arso Jovanović, Chief of the Supreme Headquarters of the Yugoslav Partisans and the architect of some of the most decisive victories of the Second World War, the commander of the first uprising in occupied Europe, the only foreign military leader decorated with the Soviet Orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov, remains one of the most brilliant yet tragically sidelined figures in modern history. In Commander with a Halo of a Martyr, journalist and former military editor Ivan Matović uncovers the life, legacy and betrayal of this legendary Montenegrin general — once hailed as the military-strategic mind of the National Liberation War, and later erased from its memory.
Drawn from exclusive military records, personal testimonies and decades of suppressed material, this book is both a biography and a political reckoning. Matović vividly recreates the wartime scenes where Arso shined: defending Sarajevo during the April War; leading the Montenegrin July 13 uprising; the heroic attack on Pljevlja; smashing the encirclement at Drvar during the famous German airborne assault; resisting Tito’s political interference in military planning; defending Yugoslav territory at the Soča River and Trieste. There is no nation in Yugoslavia that Arso did not personally lead, and therein laid his contribution to forging unity among its mosaic of peoples under fire of terror and occupation. Matović therefore daringly challenges the canonized narrative of the National Liberation War and reconstructs an entirely new one.
But the portrait that emerges is not just of a military genius. Arso Jovanović was a man of conscience and honour, a patriot, a son of the people — an officer who refused to blindly follow political parties, who defended civilian life during Anglo-American bombings approved by Tito, who questioned senseless executions and who dared to speak the truth to the leadership of a state he helped create, at the cost of his life.
Through meticulous research and emotionally charged writing, Matović traces the extremely painful trajectory from Arso’s birth, to his adult life of countless heroic stands, his ostracism and the still-unsolved mystery of his death near the Yugoslav-Romanian border in August 1948. Along the way, he confronts the political purges, ideological betrayals and competing visions of Yugoslavia that tore the postwar state apart.
Featuring rare insights from his contemporaries, including new interviews with Aleksandar Ranković and Milovan Đilas, Commander with a Halo of a Martyr restores Arso Jovanović to his rightful place — not only as a Yugoslav general, but as a emblem of self-sacrificing resistance, national unity and revolution, as a man who embodied the greatest qualities of the Yugoslav peoples.
Excerpts from Reviews
“I predict: this historical-literary chronicle by Ivan Matović about Arso R. Jovanović, Chief of the Supreme Headquarters of the National Liberation Army — thanks to its content and the author’s narrative voice — will rank among the most distinguished books in education and science, and among readers in general, as one of the most important and most engaging treatments of Yugoslavia’s participation in the Second World War.
“That is why I repeat: this chronicle must certainly be published, made into a book, and thereby most beautifully and definitively shaped into this excellent historiographical-literary work, vast in scope and rich in content…”
Academician Vlado Strugar
“This serious work by Ivan Matović is not merely a biography of Arso R. Jovanović, but an attempt to recount the history of the National Liberation War through the life of a prominent individual. It addresses the ‘sensitive topics’ of the revolution without hesitation, analyses events, questions established interpretations, compares memories and presents people — dethroned heroes of the war with both virtues and flaws. The reconstruction of key events is accompanied by their later historiographical interpretations, contributing to a subsequent demystification of the past and a revealing of the ‘mechanisms’ underlying its mythology. The dismantling of myths undoubtedly enables the efforts of a new generation — freed from ‘retrospectively constructed truths,’ ‘tailored’ conclusions and fetishes — to appear not only more genuine and life-like, but also more meaningful, even more brilliant…”
Prof. Dr. Ljubodrag Dimić