[5] In March 1941, he met Colonel William J. Donovan in Belgrade who was on a tour of the Balkans and the Middle East as the special emissary for President Franklin D.

[6] Donovan reported to Roosevelt that Simović believed that Germany would invade the Soviet Union in the near-future "...for the purpose of seizing Ukraine initially and eventually overpower south-east Europe".

[8] He appointed as his foreign minister Momčilo Ninčić, formerly the president of the Yugoslav-German friendship society, in attempt to gain favor with Adolf Hitler.

[8] There was much popular anger in Belgrade over the brutally bullying tactics of Hitler and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, which made Yugoslavia's accession appeared as an abject national humiliation, hence the outburst of widespread joy at the news of the coup.

[8] The American historian Joseph Rothschild wrote the co-leader of the coup, General Borivoje Mirković was "too politically naïve" to understand the dangers of a German invasion, but that the "more sophisticated" Simović did not.

[12] Citino wrote that Simović made two crucial errors in refusing to mobilize and spreading his forces out by trying to defend all of Yugoslavia's 1, 900 miles of frontier at once.

[17] The decision to include as many politicians as possible left the cabinet a heterogenous group with some ministers supporting signing the Tripartite Pact while others were opposed.

[19] The Serbian historian Stevan K. Pavlowitch wrote: "Simović appears to have been a patriotic general but a politically incompetent prime minister.

[20] Simović had little time to make his mark on Yugoslav politics: on the wedding day of his daughter, 6 April 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia.

[21] Operation Punishment, the invasion of Yugoslavia, began with a "decapitation strike" with the Luftwaffe bombing Belgrade three times over the course of the night of 6 April.

[27] During the meeting, Simović and Ninčić told Eden of their wish to not only restore Yugoslavia under the House of Karađorđević after the war and of their wish to create a federation with Greece and Bulgaria, albeit in the case of the latter with the proviso that the current pro-German government in Sofia would have to be overthrown first.

[16] On Serbian National Day on 28 June 1941, Simović gave a speech on the BBC's Serbo-Croatian language station, where he declared: "This German action might have had serious military consequences.

[29] Pierson Dixon, the chief of the Foreign Office's Southern Department which handled relations with the Balkans, wrote that Simović was making "fanciful" claims and he presented Yugoslavia's defeat as a sort of Allied victory, but his speech was "good propaganda".

[7] In August 1941, General Milan Nedić of the collaboratist "Government of National Salvation" in Belgrade gave a rebuttal speech where he mocking called Simović "the savior of Bolshevism" for his claim that the Yugoslav coup had delayed Operation Barbarossa for five weeks.

[7] In the meantime, Count Carlo Sforza, an anti-Fascist exile living in the United States, approached Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, about Simović's speech, saying he did not want Italy to lose any territory to Yugoslavia after the war.

[29] Halifax wrote Sforza a letter saying that Simović was expressing his personal views and the British government did not support Yugoslavia's claims against Italy.

[29] Simović expressed much anger to Eden when Halifax's letter became public knowledge and received the promise that Britain would be "sympathetic" towards Yugoslavia's claims against Italy after the war.

Nearly all of the Yugoslav forces had been captured, killed or deserted in the April campaign with a minority heading for the mountains and forests to continue the fight via guerilla warfare.

[31] Simović seized upon the existence of the Chetniks to argue that Yugoslavia was contributing to the Allied war effort by trying down German and Italian divisions that would otherwise be available for operations elsewhere.

[33] As prime minister of a government-in-exile, Simović did not enjoy the confidence of his cabinet who saw him as a "Yugoslav de Gaulle" who would dominate post-war Yugoslavia without them, and plotted endlessly against him.

[36] In a radio broadcast on the BBC's Serbo-Croat language station on 15 November 1941, Simović called for the restoration of Yugoslavia as the only way forward for the all of the South Slavic peoples, saying that despite what the Ustaše had done that Serbs and Croats were going to live again in the same state after the war.

[36] At the same time, the three deputy prime ministers, the Slovene Miha Krek, the Serb Slobodan Jovanović, and the Croat Juraj Krnjević issued a joint statement saying that after the war the political life of Yugoslavia would be based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

In November 1941, Simović asked the BBC's Serbo-Croatian station to "suspend" all calls for resistance until such a time that Allied forces could return to the Balkans as he complained that far too many innocent Serbs were being killed for the guerilla attacks.

[31] The way that Mihailović was being promoted in the British newspapers allowed the politicians to argue to the king that Yugoslavia had another popular hero and there was no need for Simović anymore.

[43] On 27 November 1941, a draft treaty was signed in London for a Greek-Yugoslav federation to be headed jointly by the kings of Yugoslavia and Greece that would come into effect after the war.

[44] The Greek prime minister Emmanouil Tsouderos was opposed to an Yugoslav-Bulgarian union, which he argued would make Greece into the junior partner in the planned federation.

[45] Gavrilović, the leader of the Serb Agrarian Party had been serving as the Yugoslav minister-plenipotentiary in Moscow, and Simović called to his cabinet in London as a potential replacement for Ninčić.

[46] In late December 1941, all of the ministers in the cabinet submitted a collective letter of resignation to King Peter II that accused Simović of being responsible for the defeat in April 1941 along with scheming against them and attempting to exclude them from the decision-making progress.

[42] Peter had long disliked the "tutoring" that Simović had giving him since March 1941 and readily dismissed him once it was clear he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the cabinet.

[48] Simović made several speeches on the BBC's Serbo-Croatian station calling for more Serbs to join the Partisans, which led for him to be denounced as a "traitor" by Mihailović.