Dragoljub Jeličić, 12-year-old Serbian soldier, posing for the photograph taken in his report, 1914.
Although older and less known than 8-year-old Serbian soldier Momčilo Gavrić, Dragoljub Jeličić was one of the youngest soldiers of World War I. Dragoljub was born in 1902 in present-day Croatia which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but his family emigrated to Šabac in Serbia due to Austro-Hunarian mistreatment. They have two different stories regarding Dragoljub Jeličić, and this is what they both say:
The first tells us that her father died in March 1912. His mother soon remarried and, apparently, Dragoljub decided to run away from his house to Belgrade, about 80 km from Šabac, so it is not known how he would have gotten there. In Belgrade, he sold newspapers and worked on a Ferris wheel. He tried to enlist in the army when the First Balkan War broke out, but was denied because of his age. Apparently in 1913 he was accepted into the army at age 11, and was already part of it when WWI broke out in 1914.
The other story says Dragoljub was in elementary school when WWI broke out, and his father was sent to the front dying in battle. Dragoljub already in Belgrade, participated in the battles of 1914 for the defense of Belgrade. She would have been 12 years old. He managed to flee to a Serbian unit on Mount Rudnik. In a battle in the Mačva region, Dragoljub replaced a dead Serbian machine gunman and he himself was wounded in the action.
Dragoljub was subsequently promoted by Prince Alexander I of Serbia. In October 1915, during the joint offensive of central powers in Serbia, Serbs withdrew through the Albanian mountains. Due to his injury, Dragoljub could not escape with the other Serbs and fell into Austro-Hungarian captivity. After several months he managed to escape captivity and somehow managed to get to Thessaloniki, where the rest of the Serbian army was stationed. Shortly before turning 14 he was promoted to Sergeant. He was injured six times in total during the course of the war.
Finished the Great War, he worked as an actor in Nikši's theatre. During the occupation of the Yugoslav Axis in World War II, he joined the Yugoslava partisan resistance movement. He died in Nikši in 1963, leaving three daughters behind him.

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