yugmodww2

YUGOSLAVIA IN WW II - INTRODUCTION

Founded on 1 December 1918 as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Yugoslavia united for the first time the bulk of the South Slav lands of the disintegrating Habsburg Empire with the previously independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro.

Those who inspired the foundation of the new state, which in 1941 covered an area of 247,542 sq.km. (95,550 sq.mi.) with an estimated population of 15.97 million, believed it must have a common identity as well as common government; but their doctrine of Yugoslav 'national oneness' served in practice to abet the assertion by the country's largest people, the Orthodox Serbs, and their dynasty, the Karadjordjevices, of dominion over the rest.

Far from fostering 'national oneness', Serbian centralism stimulated feelings of national separateness. Whether under ineffectual parliamentary rule between 1918 and 1929 or royal dictatorship thereafter, the country was riven by national and constitutional dissension.

The Catholic Croats, the second most numerous nation, were least reconciled to their subordinate status in a unitary state, but the other Yugoslav peoples, including the Serbs, and the many national minorities also had fundamental grievances.

Yugoslavia declared itself neutral in September 1939, but that did not spare it from Axis and Allied pressure or from an intensification of its domestic quarrels. The two were interrelated.

The Serbs, recalling their comradeship in arms with France and the UK on the Salonika Front in 1915-18, were both overwhelmingly pro-Allied in sentiment and inclined to feel that no war could be fought successfully without them. Serb domination of the Yugoslav officer corps, and the anglophilia of Regent Prince Paul (1893-1976), reinforced the government's portrayal of its neutrality to the Allies as a temporary expedient, necessitated by the country's strategic vulnerability and economic subordination to the Axis, as well as by the faint heartedness of the non-Serbs.

The leaders of the other Yugoslav peoples were both more impressed by Axis power than were the Serbs and less keen to fight for a state and regime which they did not really regard as theirs.

® The Slovenes, for whom no alternative was on offer, were expected to remain loyal.

® But radical Croat nationalists had not been satisfied with the belated granting of home rule in August 1939; and even the mainstream Croatian Peasant Party, despite entering government, remained susceptible to Italian blandishments concerning statehood.

® The Macedonian Slavs (classed as Serbs in the inter-war years) tended to look to Bulgaria as a possible liberator.

® The Slav Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina (claimed by both Serbs and Croats as co-nationals) were another doubtful element, while

® some Montenegrins (also defined as Serbs) hankered after a restored independence under Italian patronage. Finally,

® the large Albanian, German, and Hungarian national minorities constituted potential fifth columnists if and when putative motherlands should beckon.

M.Wheeler,

Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995), p.1293