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The 'Partisans' were the communist resistance movement engaged in the fight against the Axis forces in the Balkans during World War II, in the very beginning of the war alongside rival Chetniks, the Yugoslav People's Liberation War.

Contents

Origins

Formation

Operations

Activities increase 1943-45

Partisan rescues of Allied airmen

Partisan rescues of Allied POWs

Post-war

War crimes controversy

Cultural Legacy

References

See also

External links

Origins

In April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany. On July 30 the first rebels made their presence armed action was carried out. The participants then proceeded to Kopaonik and, together with other insurgents from the Ibar valley and the mountain villages, began the struggle against the occupation. On August 10, 1941 in Stanulović, a mountain village, they formed the Kopaonik Partisan Unit Headquarters. Their liberated area was called the Miners Republic and lasted 42 days. They joined the ranks of Tito and the ''Peoples Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia'' later on.
The Yugoslav Partisans went under the official name of People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia - (Slovene: ''Narodnoosvobodilna vojska in partizanski odredi Jugoslavije''; Croatian: ''Narodno-oslobodilačka vojska i partizanski odredi Jugoslavije''; Serbian: ''Народно-ослободилачка армија и партизански одреди Југославије'' or ''Narodno-oslobodilačka armija i partizanski odredi Jugoslavije''; Macedonian: ''Народно-ослободителна војска и партизански одреди на Југославија'' or ''Narodno osloboditelna vojska i partizanski odredi na Jugoslavija'') - and were under the direct command of Marshal Tito and the Yugoslav Communist Party (CPY) Politburo.
The occupying forces instituted such severe burdens on the local populace (in certain instances the army of Nazi Germany would hang or shoot indiscriminately, including women, children and the elderly, up to 100 local inhabitants for every one Wehrmacht soldier killed) that the Partisans came not only to enjoy widespread support but for many were the only option for survival.

Formation

The first resistance movement was formed in Ljubljana, Slovenia on April 26 (although April 27 has been celebrated officially) and it was called "The Anti-Imperialist Front", later renamed to "Liberation Front" (Slovenian: ''Osvobodilna fronta'', OF). It consisted of the Communist Party of Slovenia, the Christian Socialists, Slovenian Sokol and other small groups. First Sisak Partisan Brigade was the first anti-fascist armed unit in Europe, officially founded near Sisak, Croatia on June 22, 1941, the day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Various military formations more or less linked to the CPY were involved in various armed confrontations with Axis forces which erupted in various areas of Yugoslavia in the ensuing weeks. The CPY formally decided to launch an armed uprising on July 4, 1941, a date which was later marked as Fighter's Day - public holiday in SFRY. Žikica Jovanović Španac shot the first bullet on July the 7, 1941, and it became the day of state of the Socialist Republic of Serbia.
In Autumn 1941, the Partisans established the Republic of Užice in the liberated territory of western Serbia. In November 1941, the German troops occupied this territory again, while the majority of Partisan forces escaped towards Bosnia. It was during this time that tenuous collaboration between the Partisans and the royalist Chetnik movement broke and turned into open hostility.
On December 22, 1941 Partisans formed 1st Proletarian Brigade - the first "regular" unit able to operate outside its local area. This became the Day of the Yugoslav People (National) Army, December 22. In 1942 those units and partisan detachments merged into PLA & PDY (NOV i POJ), into a regular force, the Yugoslav Army, on March 1 1945.
On September 19, 1942 partisans in Dalmatia formed their first naval unit made of fishing boats, which gradually evolved into a force able to engage the Italian Navy and Kriegsmarine and conduct complex amphibious operations.
In May 1942 pilots of two aircraft belonging to NDH air force, Franjo Kluz and Rudi Cajevec, defected to the partisans in Bosnia and later used their planes against Axis forces. Although short-lived due to a lack of infrastructure, this was the first instance of resistance movement having its own air force. Partisans later gained permanent air force by getting aircraft, equipment and training from the Royal Air Force in 1944.

Operations

Main articles: Yugoslav People's Liberation War

The Partisans and the People's Liberation Army staged a guerrilla campaign which enjoyed gradually increased levels of support among the population. People's committees were organized to act as civilian governments in liberated areas of the country, and even limited arms industries were set-up.
At the very beginning, partisan forces were relatively small, poorly armed and without any infrastructure. But they had two major advantages over other military and paramilitary formations in former Yugoslavia.
The first and most immediate was a small but valuable cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans who, unlike anyone else at the time, had some experience with modern war fought in circumstances quite similar to those in World War II Yugoslavia.
Another, which became apparent in later stages of war, was in Partisans being founded on communist ideology rather than ethnicity. Therefore Partisans could expect at least some levels of support in almost any corner of the country, unlike other paramilitary formations limited to territories with Croat or Serb majority. This allowed their units to be more mobile and fill their ranks with larger pool of potential recruits.
Occupying and quisling forces were quite aware of the Partisan problem, and tried to solve it in seven major anti-partisan Offensives. The biggest were combined by Wehrmacht, the SS, Fascist Italy, Ustaše, Chetniks and Bulgarian forces. They included the so-called Fall Weiss (Plan White) and Operation Schwarz (Operation Black), or as they were known in the Yugoslav annals: the 4th (Battle of Neretva) and 5th (Battle of Sutjeska) Offensives.
Later in the conflict the Partisans were able to win the moral, as well as limited material support of the Allies, who until then had supported General Dragoljub "Drazha" Mihailović's ''Royalist'' Chetnik Forces, but were finally convinced of who was doing the fighting against the Axis in the region by many military missions dispatched to both sides during the course of the war.
To gather intelligence, Allied agents were infiltrated to both the Partisans and the Chetniks. The intelligence gathered by Allied liaisons to the resistance groups was crucial to the success of supply missions and was the primary influence on Allied strategy in Yugoslavia. The search for intelligence ultimately resulted in the demise of the Chetniks and their eclipse by Tito’s Partisans. In 1942, though supplies were limited, token support was sent equally to each. The new year would bring a change. The Germans were executing Operation Schwarz, one of a series of offensives aimed at the resistance fighters, when F. W. D. Deakin was sent by the British to gather information.
His reports contained two important observations. The first was that the Partisans were courageous and aggressive in battling the German 1st Mountain and 104th Light Division, had suffered important casualties, and needed more support. The second observation was that the entire German 1st Mountain Division had transited from Russia on rail lines through Mihailović-controlled territory. British intercepts (ULTRA) of German message traffic reportedly confirmed 'Chetnik timidity' or 'collaboration'. Even though today many circumstances, facts, and motivations remain unclear, intelligence reports resulted in increased Allied interest in Yugoslavia air operations and shifted policy. In September 1943, at Churchill’s request, Brigadier General Fitzroy Maclean was parachuted to Tito’s headquarters near Drvar to serve as a permanent, formal liaison to the Partisans. While the Chetniks were still occasionally supplied, the Partisans received the bulk of all future support. ^[1]

Activities increase 1943-45

After the Teheran Conference in 1943 the Partisans received official recognition as the legitimate national liberation force by the Allies, who subsequently set-up the RAF Balkan Air Force under the influence and suggestion of Brigadier-General Fitzroy MacLean, and with the aim to provide increased supplies and tactical air support for Tito's forces.
With Allied air support and assistance from the Red Army, in the second half of 1944 Partisans turned their attention to Serbia, which had seen relatively little fighting since the fall of the Republic of Užice in 1941. On 20 October the Red Army and the Partisans liberated Belgrade in a joint operation. At the onset of winter, the Partisans effectively controlled the entire eastern half of Yugoslavia - Serbia, Vardar Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as the Dalmatian coast.
In 1945 the Partisans, numbering over 800,000[1] defeated Ustaše and the Wehrmacht, breaking through a hard-fought front in Syrmia in late winter, taking Sarajevo in early April, and the rest of Croatia and Slovenia through mid-May. After taking Rijeka and Istria, which were part of Italy before the war, they beat the Allies to Trieste by a day.
'The last battle of World War Two' in Europe, the Battle of Poljana, was fought between the Partisans and retreating Wehrmacht and quisling forces at Poljana, near Prevalje in Koroška, on 14 and 15 May 1945.

Partisan rescues of Allied airmen

The Partisans were responsible for the successful and sustained evacuation of Allied airmen
from the Balkans. For example, between January 1, 1944, and October 15, 1944, according to statistics compiled by the US Air Force Air Crew Rescue Unit, 1,152 American airmen were airlifted from Yugoslavia, 795 with Partisan assistance and 356 with the help of the Chetniks. During the war, 33 flying fortresses crashed on Slovenian territory and Slovenian partisans, with the help of the civil population, rescued 303 American and 30 British airmen.

Partisan rescues of Allied POWs

The Partisans assisted hundreds of Allied escapers from POW camps, mostly in southern Austria, to freedom throughout the war, but especially from 1943-45. These were transported across Slovenia, from where many were airlifted from Semič, while others made the longer overland trek down through Croatia for a boat passage to Bari in Italy. In the spring of 1944 the British military mission in Slovenia reported that there was a ‘steady, slow trickle’ of escapers from these camps. They were being assisted by local people, and on contacting Partisans on the general line of the River Drava, they were able to make their way to safety with partisan guides.
'The raid on St Lorenzen.' A total of 132 Allied prisoners were freed by the Partisans in a single operation in August 1944 in what is known as the raid at St Lorenzen.
In June 1944 the Allied escape organisation began to take an active interest in assisting escapers from camps in southern Austria and evacuating them through Yugoslavia. A post of the Allied mission in northern Slovenia had found that at Sankt Lorenzen ob Eibiswald, just on the Austrian side of the border, about 30 miles from Maribor, there was a poorly guarded working camp from which a raid by Slovene partisans could free all the prisoners. Over a hundred of the latter were transported from Stalag XVIII-D at Maribor to St. Lorenzen each morning to do railway maintenance work, and returned to their quarters in the evening. Contact was made between Partisans and the prisoners with the result that at the end of August a group of seven slipped away past a sleeping guard at three o'clock in the afternoon, and at nine o'clock the men were eating and dancing with Partisans in a village, five miles away on the Slovenian side of the border.
The seven escapers arranged with the Partisans for the rest of the camp to be freed the following day. Next morning the seven returned with some hundred Partisans to await the arrival of the work-party by the usual train. As soon as work had begun the partisans, to quote a New Zealand eye-witness, “swooped down the hillside and disarmed the eighteen guards”. In a short time prisoners, guards, and civilian overseers were being escorted along the route used by the first seven escapers the previous evening.
At the first headquarters camp reached, details were taken of the total of 132 escaped prisoners for transmission by radio to England. Progress along the evacuation route south was difficult, as German patrols were very active. A night ambush by one such patrol caused the loss of two prisoners and two of the escort. Eventually they reached Semič, in Bela Krajina, Slovenia, which was a Partisan base catering for escapers. They were flown across to Bari on 21 September 1944. ^[2]
[3]

Post-war

Yugoslavia was one of the two European countries that were liberated by its own communist forces during the Second World War, with the assistance and active participation of the Soviet regime (the other one being Albania with the aid of Yugoslavia). It received support from both Western Allies and the Soviet Union, and at the end of the war no foreign troops were stationed on its soil. As a result, the country found itself halfway between the two camps at the onset of the Cold War.
In 1947 and 1948 Soviet Union attempted to command obedience from Yugoslavia, primarily on issues of foreign policy, which resulted in the Tito-Stalin split and almost ignited an armed conflict. A period of very cool relations with the Soviet Union followed, during which the U.S. and the UK considered courting Yugoslavia into the newly-formed NATO. This however changed in 1953 with the Trieste crisis, a tense dispute between Yugoslavia and the Western Allies over the eventual Yugoslav-Italian border (see Free Territory of Trieste), and with Yugoslav-Soviet reconciliation in 1956.
This ambivalent position at the start of the Cold War matured into the non-aligned foreign policy which Yugoslavia actively espoused until its dissolution.

War crimes controversy

The Partisans and the local population (whose massive support they enjoyed) engaged in retribution in the immediate postwar period against people who had collaborated with the Axis, fought against the Partisans, or wanted a non-Communist Yugoslavia, . Known incidents include the Bleiburg massacre of Chetniks, Slovenian Belogardists, Ustashe soldiers and civilian collaborationists who were fleeing in fear of retribution at the end of war, and the "foibe massacres" — pits in which Croatian (and Slovenian) Partisans along with groups of angry civilians shot Italian fascists, Italian nationalists as well as other enemies of the new government. According to a mixed Slovene-Italian historical commission^[4] established in 1993, which investigated only on what happened in places included in present-day Italy and Slovenia, the killings seemed to proceed from endeavours to remove persons linked with fascism (regardless of their personal responsibility), and endeavours to carry out preventive cleansing of real, potential or only alleged opponents of the communist government. Similar events involved Hungarian fascist separatists in Vojvodina (the 1944-1945 Killings in Bačka).
The numbers of dead due to Italian, German and collaborationist organised killings, however, far outstrip even the most lavish estimates of the Partisan crimes' death toll. Indeed, the Partisans were the only armed force in the region that actually didn't have official genocidal agendas (unlike the Ustaše, the Chetniks, the Italians and the Germans), as that would be fundamentally opposed to their cardinal ideal of "brotherhood and unity" (the phrase became the motto for the new Yugoslavia).
To put the extent of the actual genocide occuring in Yugoslavia during the War, it suffices to say the country suffered about one million dead during the fascist occupation, civilian and military (the two are undiscernable), three times more than the combined casualties of the USA. Only a small fraction constitute civilians actually killed by the Partisans.
This chapter of Partisan history was a taboo subject for conversation in the SFRY until the late the 1980s, and as a result, decades of official silence created a reaction in the form of numerous data manipulation for nationalist propaganda purposes.^[5]

Cultural Legacy

Partisan ranks included some of the most important artists and writers of 20th Century Yugoslavia.
The Partisan experience would have had a major impact on the culture of second half of the 20th Century in any event, but much of the result is now considered government propaganda.
Partisan struggle was well-chronicled through the memoirs of its participants, and later those experiences served as basis for important literary works, most notably by authors like Jure Kaštelan, Joža Horvat, Oskar Davičo, Antonije Isaković, Branko Ćopić, Mihailo Lalić and others.
Comic books depictings the Partisan struggle also became very popular, most notably works by Croatian artist Jules Radilović. The most popular, however, was the ''Mirko i Slavko'' comic book series.

The most visible aspect of Partisan legacy in the former Yugoslavia was the series of monuments commemorating their struggle. Most of those monuments are now considered soc-realist kitsch, while only a few proved to be artistically valuable and important. Some of them became victims of state-sponsored vandalism following the break-up of SFRY in early 1990s.
The Partisan struggle also influenced the film industry, which developed its own genre of Partisan film, with its own set of unofficial rules and motives, very much like American Western or Japanese Jidaigeki.
An outsider's perspective of the partisans is recorded in Evelyn Waugh's 1961 novel ''Unconditional Surrender'', the last of ''The Sword of Honour'' trilogy. Waugh was posted to Croatia towards the end of the war, and to some extent fictionalises his experience.

References

1. 7David Martin, Ally Betrayed: The Uncensored Story of Tito and Mihailovich, (New York: Prentice Hall, 1946), 34..
2. http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Pris-_N95868.html
3. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2003/s966136.htm
4. Slovene-Italian historical commission
5. cf David.B. MacDonald (2003) Balkan Holocausts? (Manchester)

See also

★ People's Liberation War

★ History of Yugoslavia

★ Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia

★ Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

★ OZNA

★ Battle of Poljana

★ People's Hero of Yugoslavia

★ Republic of Užice

★ Participants of note:

★
★ Sava Kovačević

★
★ Boško Buha

★
★ Ivan Ribar

★
★ Koča Popović

★
★ Josip Kraš

★
★ Edvard Kardelj

★
★ Moše Pijade

★
★ Milovan Đilas

★
★ Arso Jovanović

★
★ Randolph Churchill

★
★ Evelyn Waugh

★
★ Ivan Goran Kovačić

★
★ Stjepan Filipović

★
★ Rade Končar

★
★ Christopher Lee

★ Other:

★
★ Milan Nedić

★
★ Balkans Campaign

★
★ Catenaccio Kaos

External links

★ Alliance of Anti-fascist Fighters of Croatia

★ Office of Strategic Services - Balkan Operational Group

★ THE GERMAN CAMPAIGNS IN THE BALKANS (SPRING 1941)

★ The German Campaigns in The Balkans Spring 1941

★ Web site for the movie 'Partizanska Eskadrila'

★ Wehrmacht Anti-Partisan Operations Badge

★ European Resistance Archive (ERA) video interviews with members of the resistance during World War II