"Икона Халијард": један пример савременог конструисања српско-америчког савезништва у Другом светском рату "Icon Halyard": An Example of Contemporary Constru

English title: “Icon Halyard”: An Example of Contemporary Construction of the Serbian-American Alliance in World War II

The article “Icon Halyard”: An Example of Contemporary Construction of the Serbian-American Alliance in World War II analyzes how the 1944 evacuation of Allied airmen, organized with the participation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, has been transformed in contemporary Serbia into a memorial and political narrative of Serbian-American alliance.

Starting from the fact that the Halyard Mission was a real wartime event, the article shows that its contemporary public meaning is not merely the result of historical remembrance, but also of selective choice, political interpretation, and visual shaping of the past. Already in 1944, the evacuation of airmen had a propaganda function: the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland sought to use it as proof of its Western Allied orientation and as an argument for changing Allied policy, which was increasingly directed toward the Partisan movement.

During the Cold War, Serbian, or Chetnik, émigrés in the United States preserved the memory of the Halyard Mission as evidence that the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland had been part of the Western anti-fascist alliance. In post-socialist Serbia, this motif acquired a new function: it was used in the process of political rapprochement with the United States, with American diplomatic, military, and memorial actors also participating in the shaping of memory culture.

A central place in the article is given to the analysis of the “Icon Halyard,” created as a visual symbol of this process. It is interpreted as an example of the fusion of religious form, national symbolism, wartime memory, and contemporary foreign-policy needs. In the manner of traditional Orthodox painting, the “Icon Halyard” seeks to present the historical event of the evacuation of Allied airmen as a moral and almost sacral foundation of Serbian-American alliance.

The article shows that this form of memorial culture is not merely remembrance of the past, but an active attempt to normalize one interpretation of the past as desirable, durable, and politically usable. The “Icon Halyard” functions as a visual and political argument: it does not only depict a historical event, but seeks to incorporate it into a durable symbolic order in which the Serbian-American alliance is presented as natural, historically confirmed, and morally binding.