NY Times, Sunday, October 26, 1969

RUTH MITCHELL, WHO FOUGHT WITH CHETNIKS, 81, DIES

Ruth Mitchell, the sister of the late Gen. William (Billy) Mitchell, who gained prominence during WWII as the only foreign woman to serve with the Chetniks, Yugoslavia's guerilla fighters against the Germans, died Friday at a nursing home in Belas, Portugal. She was 81 years old and was a resident of Albufeira, Portugal.

As a child, Miss Mitchell had been taken to Europe where she wrote: "We had to go to the most unlikely, ungetatable places in bumbling trains, and if there is anything more dreary than once gory old battlefields, I pray I may never have to see it."

Eventually, she found herself in contemporary gory battle-fields.

In 1938, Miss Mitchell, who was then married to Stanley Knowles, who had been with the British diplomatic service, went to Albania on an assignment for a British publication. When the Fascist forces attacked that country, she went to Yugoslavia and in 1941, with the German attack, she joined the Chetniks.

Kosta Pechanatz, the white-bearded leader of the Komitadji, as the Chetniks were then known, explained to her that for 400 years they had harassed the Turks in guerilla warfare and that the same methods would be used when the Germans crossed the Yugoslav frontier. He gave her a vial of poison, because the patriots boasted that no member was ever taken alive. Miss Mitchell became a member of the general staff as a dispatch rider.

The red-haired, headstrong volunteer took her oath over a drawn dagger and loaded revolver and watched Mr. Pechanatz cross her name off the list of applicants for membership. "We just cross the name off, my girl, because we consider you dead when you become one of us", he said. "we value our lives as nothing. We may all be dead in a few weeks. I expect to die myself this time. How about you?"

"I am willing, too" she replied.

Miss Mitchell served as liaison officer of the Chetniks with the British Army because she could "ride just about anything on four legs".

Taken by Gestapo

Her service was short-lived, however, as she was captured by the Gestapo several months later while swimming at Dubrovnik. While still in her bathing suit, and with papers on her that would have caused her to be executed without trial, she turned to the agents and asked: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to change my trousers?" They agreed. "In that instant, I got rid of my papers", she later recounted. After a court-martial, however, she was condemned to death.

"Under certain circumstances", Miss Mitchell told her judges, "it is an honor to be shot". She defended herself in excellent German and so astounded the court that instead of being executed she was sent to prison. In 13 months, she was transferred to 12 different prisons, many of them in Germany. She was finally released in 1942 as a result of pressure from the Swiss Government and returned to the Unite States where reports of German atrocities and torture were widely disseminated.

In Washington, she presented President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a gift of basket woven from the wrappings of red cross food packages from 360 British women who were being held in a German prison camp in which she herself had been.

In 1943, she published "The Serbs Choose war", relating her own adventures and the struggle of the guerillas to liberate their country.

A staunch supporter of gen. Draja Mikhailovitch, Miss Mitchell said in 1945, after having been charged with being a traitor to the Yugoslav cause by a co-defendant of the Yugoslav general who was on trial in his country. "It is a great honor, one of the greatest ever bestowed upon me, to be called a traitor by that scoundrel, Tito. If ever there was a traitor to the Serbian people, it is Tito".

She was the granddaughter of Alexander Mitchell of Wisconsin, "one of those whom we today", she wrote, 'amuse ourselves by calling "robber barons." She was also the daughter of john Lendrum Mitchell, a United States Senator. She wrotea biography of her famous brother, "My Brother Bill", which was published in 1953.

In his review of the book for The New York Times, Charles Poore wrote: "There is a touch of Carl Sandburg's way of reminiscing over his adventure in the Spanish-America War. There are also touches of Richard Harding Davis and of the young Stephen crane, who was only a few years older than Billy Mitchell."

She is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Ruth van Breda Yohn of Westport, Conn., and three grandchildren.