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B y the summer of 1940 the grow-ing strength of Germany and Italy made Yugoslav neutrality

difficult to maintain. After the fall of France and the isolation of Britain, Yugoslavia was diplomatically alone. Further, Mussolini, who’d just taken his country into the war, wanted to invade Yugoslavia and annex the territories of Dalmatia and Istria while also sponsor-ing Croatian separatism. Hitler initially thought otherwise, though, because he viewed the Yugoslav Army as the direct descendent of the staunch Serb

Army of World War I, and he also saw any distraction of forces to the strategic backwater of the Balkans as undesirable.

By 1941, however, the Germans were no longer content with Yugoslav neutral-ity, and during the winter of 1940−41 their diplomatic pressure increased on Belgrade. The Yugoslav government, lacking allies in Europe after the destruction of France, Czechoslovakia and Poland, finally joined the Axis on 25 March. That government was in turn overthrown, only two days later, by a military coup supported by an

angry mob that occupied the streets of Belgrade. All pro-German diplomats and ministers were swiftly replaced. In the words of British soldier Michael McConville, who fought in Yugoslavia with No. 2 Commando Brigade: “it [the coup] was a self-generated outburst of spontaneous revulsion at the expedient abandonment of a hallowed national, primarily Serbian, custom of hitting back hard at the teeth of threats and to hell with the consequences.”

The coup in Belgrade caused a tantrum in Hitler. He decided to

Partisan: A Strategic Analysis of the War in Yugoslavia, 1942−44 by Javier

Romero

A determined looking woman Partisan shoulders an Italian rifle. During the war, 100,000 women served with the Partisans and estimated 25,000 died.

angry mob that occupied the streets of

Buy Now! angry mob that occupied the streets of

In the words of British soldier Michael

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Tito

During the second half of the 20th century, Tito passed from being idolized at home and hailed abroad as one of the most outstanding leaders of his era, to being reviled in his own country and all but forgotten abroad. He passed away on 4 May 1980, and in 1982 then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig wrote in the visitors book at his tomb that Tito had been the: “great leader and world statesman who led the Yugoslav peoples out of the ruins of war, to stability at home, to respect and prestige in the world.”

Since the break up of Yugoslavia into its constituent republics, virtually every monument, statue and bust of Tito has been stored away, obliterated or otherwise covered up.

The seventh son of a peasant family of mixed Croat and Slovene ancestry, Tito was born Josip Broz on 25 May 1892 in Kumrovec, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1914 he fought with distinction in the Austro-Hungarian Army, first against the Serbs then against the Russians, being promoted to sergeant and proposed for a

decoration. In April 1915 he was captured and made a prisoner of war. In 1917, during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, he declared for the Bolsheviks, joining the Communist Party. By 1920 he was back in the newly created “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,” also known as Yugoslavia (“Land of the South Slavs”), where he joined the Yugoslav Communist Party or KPJ (Komunistika Partija Jugoslavije).

After several years of political activity he was imprisoned by the royalist government and served five years. After his release in March 1934 he lived clandestinely under the new name of “Tito.” That was the first of the some 70 nom de guerre he used during the inter-war period. For example, within the Komintern he was known as “Comrade Walter.” In early 1935 he visited Stalin’s Russia, where he impressed many with his steadfastness and loyalty. When the head of the Yugoslav Communist Party was purged in 1937, on Stalin’s orders, Tito was given that post, the same one he held in April 1941 when Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers. ★

Marshall Tito

conquer the Balkans before beginning the invasion of the USSR in order to secure his deep southern flank. The British air force was already moving into Greece to support that nation’s defensive stand against Mussolini’s stalled inva-sion; so it was possible RAF bombers would soon be in range of the Ploesti oil wells. Those facilities were vital for the Wehrmacht, at least until Soviet oil was at its disposal. On 6 April 1941, then, German, Italian and Hungarian forces invaded Yugoslavia. Belgrade was savagely bombed for three days, with thousands of its inhabitants killed in the aptly named “Operation Punishment.”

In order to try to maintain the politi-cal integrity of the country, the Yugoslav Royal Army deployed to defend all its territory, thereby fatally overextending its units on a long front. Further, when the Germans struck, the Yugoslav mobilization was only about 70 percent complete. Within less than two weeks all was over: the overall defense collapsed while most Slovene and Croat units deserted and went home. Zagreb, where the Germans were greeted as liberators, fell on the 10th; Belgrade followed on the 13th. In two weeks of campaigning the Germans suffered only 558 casualties and the Italians 3,500, while capturing some 300,000 prisoners of war. At the same time, though, no less than 200,000 former Yugoslav soldiers remained free, most of them Serbs. Vast quantities of weapons were also left scattered every-where, while thousands went home carrying their rifles with them. The Germans were in a hurry to withdraw the bulk of their force in order to allow it time to regroup prior to the coming invasion of the USSR; so they didn’t spend much effort in cleanup opera-tions. Many within the manpower pool left behind by the Germans were there-fore soon again at war with the Reich.

The New Order

At the end of the campaign the Germans and Italians divided Yugoslavia into two broad areas of occupation. The line Visegrad-Sarajevo-Banja Luka marked the boundary between the two spheres: everything north of it went

to the Germans while the Italians got the south. Slovenia was annexed by Germany, Kosovo and the Albanian-populated areas of Macedonia were added to Italian-controlled Albania, while a pseudo-independent Croatian client state (including Bosnia and Herzegovina) was also set up. A large part of ethnically Croatian Dalmatia, and almost all the Adriatic islands, were directly annexed by Italy along with Kotor bay and the Montenegro coast. Montenegro and a rump Serbia were also declared “independent,” while Budapest was given the ethnically Hungarian Vojvodina region. Finally, Bulgaria got Macedonia, western Thrace (from Greece), and some smaller areas bordering Serbia.

Rebellion against the occupation began in August 1941, when an uprising in Montenegro drove the Italians to take refuge inside their garrison towns. The Italians took almost a year to put down that uprising, and did so only by finally reaching an agreement with the local Chetnik (Serbian royalist) militias: the Italians would yield control of the countryside; in exchange, those same

Chetniks would keep the territory free of partisans (pan-Slav communists).

Upon the start of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941— prior to which they had orders from Moscow not to interfere with the occupiers — the communists began to raise partisan (literally “politically based”) units. Tito had proved prescient enough to warn, in May, that the Nazi-Soviet pact wouldn’t last and to prepare for an uprising. At the same time he was wrong, though, in that he also expected the arrival of the victorious Red Army soon after the new phase of the war started. In fact, he remained undercover in Belgrade until mid-September in order to be in the best position to welcome the Soviets when they arrived.

The partisans first gained control of the region along the Bosnia-Montenegro-Serbia border, centered on the town of Uzice (hence its name, “Uzice Republic”), which was in turn attacked in November 1941 by German troops (their so-called “First Offensive”). The partisans fled and regrouped in Montenegro and southeastern Bosnia.

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upper-right — SS troops in the Balkans for the 1941 invasion serve as human brakes as their personnel carrier, which ran off the roadway

and teeters on the edge of a rocky incline.

lower-right — German motorcyclists bump slowly along a stretch of hurriedly constructed

corduroy road, made of rough-hewn logs laid side by side by combat engineers.

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At the same time, Col. Dragoljub “Draza” Mihailovic, a Serb officer from the old royalist army, with a group of Chetnik (“military”) followers, established himself at Ravna Gora. Appointed by the Yugoslav government-in-exile as commander-in-chief of the Yugoslav Army of the Homeland (JVO), he recruited followers exclusively among Serbs. Initially, at least, he seemed to have no political agenda: he simply fought for the old Serbia he knew.

From the onset both guerrilla movements had opposing strategies. Tito wanted to wage immediate and broad-scale war at all costs. Mihailovic wanted to gather strength, wait until the Western Allies returned to the continent, then attack as a kind of liberating spearhead that would thus prevent the communists from taking over the country. He also feared terrible reprisals from the Axis occupiers if they attacked the enemy prematurely. He was right in that, while the Germans suffered only some 20,000 casualties during their entire time in Yugoslavia, from June 1941

to April 1945, reprisals and the civil war caused some 1 million Yugoslav deaths. Of course, it must also be pointed out the Axis occupation of an increasingly restive Yugoslavia required as much as 38 of their divisions, which — under Mihailovic’s strategy — could’ve been used elsewhere.

Tito wanted to wage all-out war not only to destroy German units, thus forcing Berlin to send troops badly needed elsewhere simply to maintain the occupation of Yugoslavia. He also understood the resultant chaos and anarchy of guerrilla war would go a long way toward enabling his revo-lutionary movement to take over the entire country at the end of the war. In that regard, Tito also had an advantage in that he had multi-ethnic units willing and able to operate anywhere. (Those first “proletarian” brigades and divisions began to be formed in 1942) Tito’s men would hit enemy garrisons without concern about possible local reprisals. On the contrary, such reprisals ended up being a source of recruits for his units. Mihailovic’s units were strictly territorial and mono-

ethnic. Even more, he couldn’t always control them; most of them (especially the Chetniks of Bosnia) recognised him only as honorary leader, only obeying his orders when they coincided with their own priorities.

Waging immediate revolutionary war thus became Tito’s first break with Moscow’s orders. That is, through the end of 1941, Stalin’s top priority was simply ensuring the survival of the Soviet Union. He feared open communist revolution in the Balkans would lead the Western Allies to stop sending military aid to the USSR. Stalin therefore called for collaboration with the Chetniks and the forming a “united front” coalition with all “anti-fascist elements” in the country.

1942

Strategically isolated from the larger war, both the partisans and Chetniks were largely left to their own devices. Tito began the year based in the Foca area (the border region between Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia), while

Bearded Drazha Mihailovich addresses villagers in west Bosnia to gain support for the Serbian Chetniks.

Mihailovic remained in his stronghold of Ravna Gora. From January through March 1942, several Italo-German anti-partisan drives in eastern Bosnia (termed their “Second” and “Third Offensives”) forced Tito to withdraw to western Bosnia; however, that already devastated territory couldn’t support them; so they moved into western Bosnia. That region was populated by Serbs but was controlled and terrorized by the Croatian Ustache (native fascist) movement. Amid that sympathetic population the partisans could regroup, recruit new troops and strike into Serbia, control of which was to eventually prove key in winning the entire guerrilla war (in western Bosnia there were no Italian

troops, as they’d withdrawn from the area, preferring instead to sponsor Serbian Chetniks and local militias). In November 1942, Tito established his new headquarters in the town of Bihac.

Tito’s force continued to grow during the winter of 1942−43. Unobserved by the Western Allies — who knew almost nothing of partisan activities; only ULTRA intercepts of German commu-nications being sent out of Yugoslavia gave them an idea of what was happening — by early 1943 the partisans deployed nine divisions (including the elite 1st and 2nd Proletarian and 3rd Assault Divisions), eight brigades and many smaller detachments.

1943−44

The new year soon provided great news: the fall of Stalingrad followed by the Axis defeat in Libya. The Germans then had to fear possible Allied landings in Sicily, mainland Italy or the Balkan peninsula; so they set in motion plans aimed at suppressing the Yugoslav insurgents before any of those projected operations could take place. That was the Fourth Offensive, also codenamed Operations White I, II and III. They were the largest anti-partisan efforts to date, with the first objective the destruction of Tito’s stronghold at Bihac.

Operation White I opened on 20 January with 90,000 Axis troops (German, Italian and Croat) participat-ing. Tito fled from Bihac and moved back into eastern Bosnia. At the Battle of the Neretva River, in March, the partisans managed to cross that water barrier and break out of a German encirclement, though they suffered heavy casualties while doing so. The survivors then cut their way relatively easily through some 20,000 Chetniks who attempted to prevent them from moving toward Montenegro and Serbia.

During that period Tito also attempted to negotiate a truce with the Germans in order to allow his forces to concentrate on destroying the Chetniks. The Germans, though, correctly perceived the communists were the far bigger threat to their occupation, and so refused to make a deal.

above — German security police find a just-abandoned campsite in Slovenia.below — SS troops mow down fugitives in Serbia in 1942. Thousands of innocent civilians were killed by the Germans, who looked on them as “bandits” or “Communist suspects.”

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moved back to Drvar in western Bosnia. On 25 May 1944, Tito’s birthday,

the Germans launched yet another offensive, (the Seventh) against the par-tisans. It was an airborne raid by an SS parachute battalion aimed at assassinat-ing Tito. With the partisans leaderless, a joint offensive was then to have been launched by Ustache and German troops in Bosnia. Though the SS battalion was effectively destroyed (70 percent casualties), Tito barely escaped capture. He fled to the British base on Vis.

1944−45

By the summer of 1944, the partisan movement had grown even inside Croatia. At the same time, though, Serbia remained firmly supportive of Mihailovic. That remained true even after he was stripped of official position: in September, the government in exile appealed to all Yugoslavs to support Tito.

In September 1944, with the Red Army at last approaching the Yugoslav border, Tito flew to Moscow to co-ordinate the military aspects of that arrival. The plan agreed on stipulated the Soviets wouldn’t take Belgrade until such time as the partisans also arrived there in force. During that month the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front reached the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border. At the same time, though, the German troops occupying Greece and Albania managed to escape north in an orderly retreat, with the partisans unable to stop them. The partisans entered Belgrade on 20 October 1944, in a joint offensive with Soviet 57th Army.

The guerrilla phase of the war was then over. A conventional war took its place, one for which the partisans were ill prepared. Though further strength-ened by continued Western Allied aid, by the newly allied Bulgarian Army, and by mass conscription and amnesty in the newly liberated territories, the partisans, numbering some 800,000 troops by April 1945, found it difficult to advance in open country against a veteran and well-equipped enemy. The Germans success-fully contested all Yugoslav offensives. Zagreb, for instance, didn’t fall until May 1945, when the remaining Croat and Chetnik forces decided to retreat to Austria to surrender there to the British. (The move did them no good: they were handed over to the partisans, who indulged in a final round of reprisals, executing some 30,000.) In fact, the fighting in Yugoslavia didn’t fully end until 15 May, a week after the surrender of all other Axis forces in Europe.

Conclusion

In respect to the Balkans, the Germans were strategically concerned with only by two things. First, they wanted to secure their southern flank against Anglo-Allied invasion. Second, they wanted to secure the sources of several critical raw materials, namely Ploesti oil and other minerals com-ing from Yugoslav mines. All their operations in Yugoslavia were ultimately driven by those two concerns.

Below the strategic level, however, the horrific Axis conduct of their Balkan counterinsurgency provides a case study of how not to wage such a war. Their counter-productive and bloody policies, as well as those of their imitative Croat satellite state, created perfect conditions for the communists to eventually take over: they destroyed existing authority and set the various nationalities against each other, while at the same time lacking sufficient on-hand strength to

impose a substitute system. The result was violent anarchy and an ideal situa-tion for the propagation of revolutionary war that Tito exploited to the full. ✪

SOURCES

Deakin, F. W. The Embattled Mountain. London, 1971. Djilas, Milovan. Wartime. New York, 1977.Malaparte, Curzio. Kaputt. Barcelona, 1990.McLean, Fitzroy. Eastern Approaches. London, 1991.McConville, Michael. A Small War in the Balkans.

London, 2007.Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Tito: A Reassessment. London, 1992._______. Hitler’s New Disorder:

The Second World War in Yugoslavia. London, 2008.Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia,

1941−45: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford, CA, 2001.

In May and June the Germans launched another major offensive, Operation Black. It forced Tito to suspend further operations against the Chetniks. At the Battle of Sutjeska Valley the partisans again managed to disengage and flee, re-establish-ing themselves in eastern Bosnia. By that time, however, the entire partisan army had been reduced to no more than 10,000 combatants.

In July the Anglo-Americans landed in Sicily, and follow-on landings were expected shortly in mainland Italy or the Balkans. At that juncture the British called on the Chetniks, for whom they were the main weapons supplier, to increase their activities so as to tie up as many German units as possible.

Along that same line, Sir William Deakin, who’d been an assistant to Winston Churchill prior to the war, had been parachuted into Tito’s headquarters in May. His reports made it clear Tito’s partisans represented the only effective movement fighting the Germans, while Mihailovic did nothing and, worse, often reached agreements with the Axis occupiers to fight the partisans. By September, then, when Italy surrendered, the Western Allies decided to give all their support to Tito. Tito’s winning personality had also played a part in that reassessment, as Deakin wrote:

One would expect to be dealing with a rigid doctrinaire fanatic, harshly moulded by underground life, narrow in outlook, and impervious to open debate. Instead, the personality of Tito emerged as that of a man broad-ened by the experience of exile and prison, flexible in discussion, with a sharp and humorous wit, and a wide curiosity.

Back in eastern Bosnia, Tito’s movement reaped dividends from the disappointment of the Croatian population with the fanatic Ustashe. Croats began to join the partisan bands, while the communist political program offered an idea for a new Yugoslavia that increasingly appealed to all nationalities in the country. The Italian surrender also gave the partisans access to a huge amount of materiel abandoned by those units, as well as a sudden, though tem-porary, expansion of territorial control.

When Italy surrendered, the Germans launched Operation Constantine, the goal of which was to occupy their former zone, disarm their units and send the men into captivity in Germany. An entire Italian division, the 41st Firenze Infantry Division, defected and joined the partisans. That was followed by a race among the Germans, partisans and

Chetniks to seize the caches of arms and supplies in the former Italian zone. Tito was furious the Western Allies hadn’t trusted him enough to tip him off about the Italian surrender.

After several weeks of chaotic fight-ing, the Germans controlled the main coastal cities and the islands, except for Vis (Lissa in Italian), where a British base was established through which to channel further logistical support to Yugoslavia. From there a British com-mando brigade under Maj. Randolph Churchill (son of Winston) operated until 1945, launching raids against other islands and the Yugoslav mainland.

By late September there were 14 German divisions in Yugoslavia fight-ing some 145,000 insurgents (90,000 partisans). In November there were 17 divisions; by the end of the year there were 20 divisions fielding some 700,000 troops (though almost all of them were second-rate or third-rate units).

The Western Allies remained fully committed to Tito, but their advance in Italy had stalled in front of the Germans’ Gustav line. In December, after having reconquered the Yugoslav coast and its immediate hinterland, the Germans launched a new anti-partisan drive(the Sixth Offensive) into eastern Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia, again in antic-ipation of an Allied landing. The partisan main force and Tito’s headquarters

Dazed and wounded Partisans rest at Milinklade in June 1943 after a nine-hour bombing attack.Partisans use a captured 50mm German gun to fire on advancing tanks in Bosnia in December 1943.

impose a substitute system. The result

Buy Now! impose a substitute system. The result was violent anarchy and an ideal situa-tion for the propagation of revolutionary

✪

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