(8) YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR & WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

(6 APRIL 1941 – 25 MAY 1945)

 

“In April 1941, the Axis powers conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and thereafter the real struggle for the control of those countries began.”

That’s how H.P. Willmott summed it up in The Great Crusade, his history of the Second World War. While Greece will earn a place in my special mentions, the partisan warfare in Yugoslavia deserves its place in my Top 10 Second World Wars.

That’s because of two reasons – its scale and the effectiveness of the partisans under Tito.

The former is reflected in its casualties, with Yugoslavia having one of the highest death tolls by population, usually estimated as at least one million (or approximately 7% of the population), of which over half were civilian.

The partisans were no slouches in number of combatants either – originally a guerilla force aided by their country’s mountainous terrain, they switched to a conventional force apparently numbering 650,000 in 1944 (and increasing to 800,000 in 1945) in four field armies in 52 divisions, with a navy and air force.

Their effectiveness is usually considered in terms of being Europe’s most effective anti-Axis resistance movement in the war – unique or almost unique among such movements or partisans to liberate their country with their own forces during the war.

(In its article on the Yugoslav Partisans, Wikipedia nominates Yugoslavia as “one of only two European countries that were largely liberated by its own forces during World War II” – I recall the other is Albania, although I also recall Greek partisans had liberated substantial parts of Greece).

Of course, they didn’t and probably couldn’t do without outside help. They were aided by joint operations with the Soviet operation against Belgrade, the national (and Serbian) capital. They were also aided throughout by logistics and air support from the western allies.

More substantially, they were aided by Germany’s priority to commit forces elsewhere against the Soviets or western allies, as well as by the desertion of Germany’s allies, both those allies surrendering to switch sides and of forces fielded in Yugoslavia itself, often literally deserting to join the partisans.

Even so, Germany and its allies came very close to destroying the partisans in spring and summer 1943 – that is, before the reversal of fortunes from the surrender of Germany’s most significant ally in Europe, particularly in terms of forces occupying Yugoslavia, Italy.

This illustrates that the Yugoslavian war of liberation was no simply two-sided affair, but rather a bitter battle royale on all sides – summed up by a quip from John Irving’s Setting Free the Bears to the effect that it was a hard war if you didn’t change sides at least once.

On what might be described as the Axis side, there was of course Germany, which had primarily defeated Yugoslavia in April 1941 but had then largely left the occupation of Yugoslavia to its allies – Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and their various client regimes, most notoriously the Ustashe of Croatia. That is, until the surrender of Italy and the threat of Allied landings in the Mediterranean extending to the Balkans forced Germany to commit more substantial forces.

On what might be described as the Yugoslav side, there was actually a multi-side civil war, albeit primarily between Tito’s communist partisans and the royalist Chetniks, although there were also the collaborationist forces of Axis client regimes as well as, bizarrely, the White Russian émigré “Russian Protective Corps”. The Chetniks increasingly collaborated with the Axis forces, with the Allies ultimately abandoning them to support Tito’s partisans.

Tito and his partisans emerged victorious as Yugoslavia’s postwar communist or socialist government, naming the war they had won as the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution. However, because they had won it largely with their own forces, they were able to remain outside the Soviet bloc – unlike the other eastern European communist states which had been essentially imposed by Soviet forces – effectively defecting from it in what was famously the first major split within the communist world, the Tito-Stalin split.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)