18 Facts About Yugoslav Partisans

Objectives of the rival resistance movement, the Chetniks, were the retention of the Yugoslav Partisans monarchy, ensuring the safety of ethnic Serb populations, and the establishment of a Greater Serbia through the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from territories they considered rightfully and historically Serbian.

The journalist Tim Judah notes that in the early stage of the war the initial preponderance of Serbs in the Yugoslav Partisans meant in effect a Serbian civil war had broken out.

The killing of civilians discouraged the Chetniks from carrying out overt resistance, however the Yugoslav Partisans were not fazed and continued overt resistance which disrupted Axis forces, but led to significant civilian casualties.

Later in the conflict the Yugoslav Partisans were able to win the moral, as well as limited material support of the western Allies, who until then had supported General Draza Mihailovic's Chetnik Forces, but were finally convinced of their collaboration fighting by many military missions dispatched to both sides during the course of the war.

The first was that the Yugoslav Partisans were courageous and aggressive in battling the German 1st Mountain and 104th Light Division, had suffered significant casualties, and required support.

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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.

The Bosnian Yugoslav Partisans were heavily reduced during Operation Trio on the resistance in eastern Bosnia.

The Yugoslav Partisans later established a permanent air force by obtaining aircraft, equipment, and training from captured Axis aircraft, the British Royal Air Force, and later the Soviet Air Force.

Also, it should be kept in mind that until the middle of the war the Yugoslav Partisans were in control of relatively large liberated areas only in parts of Bosnia.

The Partisans played down communism in favour of a Popular Front approach which appealed to all Yugoslavs In Bosnia, the Partisan rallying cry was for a country which was to be neither Serbian nor Croatian nor Muslim, but instead to be free and brotherly in which full equality of all groups would be ensured.

However, in some areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina the Yugoslav Partisans were successful in attracting both Muslims and Croats from the beginning, notably in the Kozara Mountain area in north-west Bosnia and the Romanija Mountain area near Sarajevo.

The Serb contribution to Croatian Yugoslav Partisans represented more than their proportion of the local population.

In early 1943 Yugoslav Partisans took steps to establish ZAVNOH to act as a parliamentary body for all of Croatia – the only one of its kind in occupied Europe.

In other parts of Croatia Croat support toward the Yugoslav Partisans gradually increased due to Ustasha and Axis violence and misrule, but much more slowly than in Dalmatia.

Slovene Yugoslav Partisans retained their specific organizational structure and Slovene language as the commanding language until the last months of World War II, when their language was removed as the commanding language.

Yugoslav Partisans were responsible for the successful and sustained evacuation of downed Allied airmen from the Balkans.

Yugoslav Partisans assisted hundreds of Allied soldiers who succeeded in escaping from German POW camps throughout the war, but especially from 1943 to 1945.

The other way that the Yugoslav Partisans acquired weapons was from supplies given to them by the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, including the PPSh-41 and the Sten MKII submachine guns respectively.