General Maxwel Taylor's bodyguard was a communist?

[Mark V.]

Here's a very interesting story of a very remarkable man. The story is taken from this website: http://www.hbo.com/apps/band/site/clien ... p?exid=579 , with a few of my observations and is well worth the reading.

(This account is based on my recollections of stories told to me by the soldier involved -- any errors or omissions are mine. Steve is still living in Dubrovnik and recently celebrated his 90th birthday by parasailing around Dubrovnik Harbor in remembrance of his days as a paratrooper. He would probably yell at me for telling what is his own personal story, but I consider him one of a kind and think he ought to be recognized, because America owes a debt to this man and all his 'Band of Brothers.")

Stevan Dedijer [born 1911 in sarajevo] was a Yugoslav national living in the U.S. when the war broke out. He came from a prominent Yugoslav family; his father was involved in Serbian intelligence and may have had something to do with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which of course touched off the First World War. So his amazing life spans the events of the entire century.

At the time America became involved in the war, Stevan's brother, Vladimir, was fighting the Germans with Tito and his partisans [he was a member of Tito's inner cyrcle]. Steve had come to America to go to school, first attending the Taft School in Connecticut for one year, then going to Princeton [ther he listened to Einstein, Bohr, Fermmi and others], where he majored in physics and captained the soccer team. At the end of his time at Princeton, in 1932, he decided to join the Communist Party of the USA.

Clearly his family's ties to Tito had something to do with this decision. (Aside from his brother, who eventually became Tito's official biographer, his mother had hidden Tito at least once from the Royalist authorities.) But Steve has always been a fiercely independent sort and might deny that anyone could influence his decisions. Steve traveled around the US organizing coal miners and working for the Party for much of the eleven years that followed.

At any rate, by 1943 Stalin called upon all good communists worldwide to resist Hitler from wherever they were. So Steve signed up for the OSS. He passed all the tests and was ready to ship out with them for service behind the lines in Yugoslavia when his Communist affiliation was found out. "Suddenly the next morning I am out of the OSS! So I signed up for the 101st Airborne."

Steve was not quite in time to join the 101st for Normandy. But he was assigned as one of several bodyguards to Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the commanding general of the division. In this capacity, Steve jumped behind the lines several times with Taylor.

"Taylor hated that I was a communist," Steve remembered. "One time we were jumping behind the lines together. We were supposed to wait 5 seconds after the guy in front of us jumped. But I jumped out right behind Taylor and yelled 'Long Live Stalin!' in his ear. He didn't like that."

In the Arnheim campaign Steve recalls crawling beside Taylor toward the Wilhelmina canal bridge, their first objective. "Taylor and I were crawling along. We got to within 50 meters of the bridge, and the Germans blew it up right in our faces. So if the TV show ['Band of Brothers'] shows Taylor crawling toward the bridge, the stupid-looking guy next to him is me!"

Some time later, Steve and Taylor were reconnoitering a position on the Rhine when shells started exploding all around them. "I started to run for cover when I looked back and saw that Taylor was hit. I ran back, threw him over my shoulders, and ran him over to a ditch, and threw him down and jumped on top of him -- protecting the body, the way I had been trained.

"The whole time I was carrying him, Taylor was yelling, 'God damn it, wounded in the ass!'"

Taylor was evacuated out because of his wound. Because of that, and the absence of the second in command, Gen. Tony McAuliffe was put in charge. Steve was assigned as bodyguard to McAuliffe in Taylor's absence.

Therefore Steve was present at Bastogne when McAuliffe sent his famous "NUTS" reply to the German unconditional surrender demand.

"There was this very funny Irish-American fellow. He was sort of the camp wit. I still have a photograph of him in a captured SS officer's cap, doing a mock Hitler salute. Anyway, when the surrender demand came in, everyone crowded around McAuliffe as he read it. As he started reading it, he said, 'Oh, nuts.'

"After a minute of silence, he turned around and said, 'Well, fellas, what do we do about this?'

"And this Irish guy says, 'You just said it.'

"'Just said what?' McAuliffe answered.

"'Nuts,' said the Irish guy. 'Just write 'Nuts.' So McAuliffe wrote 'Nuts.'"

After Patton relieved McAuliffe, Steve requested a transfer to the Yugoslav National Liberation Army so he could rejoin his brother. Taylor, in granting this request, wrote an encomium to him, calling him "wholly fearless," and saying that there was no finer soldier under his command. The night before he left, Steve's pals threw him a little party. He showed them the letter. Their response was typical GI: "The old man must have been drunk to write this!"

Startlingly, even after his many exhibitions of bravery on the battlefield, Steve still felt that he was a coward. The first night in Bastogne, a pal called out to him from a passing tank, headed toward the still-fluid front line. "Hop on, Stevie!" he yelled. Steve told him he couldn't, because he had to get back to HQ. That night his pal was killed. "Ever since," Steve wrote, "I have felt myself to be a coward." Those who have met him must disagree with this self-assessment.

After the war he held various high positions under the Tito government [like for example leading the Yugoslav Atom bomb program], but after 1954 he was "disgraced" because of his support for democracy, and eventually he left Yugoslavia in 1961 for Sweden.

In 1992, he felt that he was called to "one last Bastogne," and returned at the age of 80 to Dubrovnik, Croatia to use his voice and pen against the Milosevic regime and its genocidal tactics. He has resided both there and in Lund, Sweden (where he founded a research institute at Lund University) ever since.

A few years ago, I received a Christmas card from Steve. "Have you seen this movie 'Forrest Gump'? I was walking back home to my apartment after seeing it, and I thought to myself, 'We are all Gumps!'"

I had to write him back, "I personally have never carried a wounded general out of battle, or met with world leaders, or witnessed major events in history firsthand... YOU are a Gump, maybe the Gump of the entire 20th century." He might disagree, but I think he'd be wrong, and Stevan Dedijer, PFC, remains the most fascinating person I have ever met, and a true hero.

[rcocean]

Fascinating story.