Maks Baće Milić

[1][2] Born in Pakoštane (near Zadar) and raised in Split, he studied philosophy in Zagreb, became a student organizer and a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1934.

The first detachments formed in Summer 1941 and manned by idealistic but inexperienced youths from coastal towns were poorly led and decimated by Italian units even before they began to operate in the Split hinterland in the vicinity of Sinj.

During an operation in the vicinity of the Dalmatian village Tugare Maks Baće was shot through the chest and left by his comrades as dead.

A free Vis was later critical to Tito's own escape from German airdrop encirclement in Bosnia (called "Operation Knight's Leap") of his Drvar headquarters, as well as the locus of early negotiations between partisans and the Allies.

[3] After the war Maks Baće was a minister in the government of Yugoslavia, its ambassador to Japan and Sweden and then a member of the National Assembly and its Secretary.

[3] He was a free thinker viewing party dogma critically and gradually became disillusioned with Communism and the ideological (as opposed to experience-based) political thinking of the regime.

In 1971 during Croatian Spring he made the significant political statement of resigning from the Communist Party, and retired to Split, at which point he began to be viewed as a dissident.