Chapter 26

(APR 1941 THE INVASION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND GREECE)

• During the war, a battle was fought here, not only for the creation of a new Yugoslavia, but also a battle for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign republic. To some generals and leaders their position on this was not quite clear. I never once doubted my stance on Bosnia. I always said that Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot belong to this or that, only to the people that lived there since the beginning of time.

• Josip Broz Tito

During the month of April, 1941, Hitler launched “Operation Castigo” with the Luftwaffe hitting the Capitol city of Belgrade on a quiet Palm Sunday.

The main thrust of the attack was really to clean up the mess the Italians had made in Greece against a far smaller enemy than their superior force.

The death toll for civilians in Yugoslavia from the air war was almost twenty thousand. It was the bloodiest Sunday of the war thus far. The entire Yugoslavian air force of several hundred fighter planes and bombers were mostly destroyed on the ground before they even had a chance to take off and defend their country.

Almost 17,000 German troops and over one thousand tanks swept into Greece finding only slight resistance in the face of such overwhelming military power.

At the same time, the Luftwaffe also heavily bombed the port city of Piraeus denying the allies a deep water port and the German Army divisions moved onward toward Salonica and the full occupation of the entire country of Greece with an Iron fist.

When one thinks of the ongoing operations against Britain only a short distance from the German divisions waiting in France for further orders, the Afrika Korps moving thousands of miles in different directions in Northern Africa, the occupation of numerous conquered countries in Europe proper and Eastern Europe and the tremendous drain on resources for the expedition into Russia; the fact that Hitler was able to expand his master plan to seal the southern flank with occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece is astounding with the depth of his military power.

It certainly must have caught the attention of military planners in the Pentagon up in Washington, D.C. and Roosevelt immediately pumped up the production of military arms despite not actually being in the war as yet. Tank, Fighter Plane and Submarine production had been increasing at blazing speed in the Third Reich for several years in a covert manner because of the terms of the World War I Armistice that specifically forbade such military preparations. Unfortunately, most of Europe was too timid to challenge the increasing power of Hitler and the United States was wallowing in the throes of the recently concluded “Great Depression” that saw jobs and savings lost for almost a full decade. Of course, the economic depression was worldwide and it was not merely the United States that suffered the consequences. There were forces in the United States with the obsession of “non-interventionism” that constantly reminded the American public of the losses of World War I to leverage them to resist the common-sense impulse to join forces with Britain in fighting the Nazi scourge.

In actuality, the United States was like a caged beast waiting for some signal to begin asserting the potential of unlimited production capability. All of the means of production were right at hand and it only took a motivating trigger to awaken the sleeping Tiger.

That trigger was soon be pulled on December 7th, 1941, a day that would “live in infamy” as pronounced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt shortly after.

Hitler’s advisors all consoled him that the United States had no interest in entering the war in Europe and that he would have a free hand in carving out a huge slice of the world for the Thousand Year Reich. His planners assured him that the Imperial Power of Japan was interested only in dominance of their Asian neighborhood and would not present any competition to him in his sphere of influence. He excused their non-Aryan roots with the belief that their Pacific Navy would sufficiently distract the Americans from any interference in Europe long enough for him to conclude his initial goals.

Operation Barbarossa was a mistake that he was soon to make it would cost him fully one-third of his military manpower and a tremendous amount of German resource wealth to conclude the failed attempt to crush the Kremlin.

In comparison the expeditions into North Africa and into the Balkans were far more limited in resources and more successful in terms of tying up Allied attentions.

It made sense for the Allies to want to sweep the Africa Korps from North Africa before striking into the Balkans and Greece. No war planner with a sound mind could possibly say with certainty that the Italian incursion and swift defeat by the Greeks had managed to “soften up the target” but Hitler knew he had to protect that southern flank if his designs on the Soviet Union had any chance of success.

At the time, Hitler still had the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union, but it was just a matter of time before one of them attacked the other with as much force as possible. Everybody in Germany knew it was coming; it was just a matter of timing and the element of surprise to assure success.

Yugoslavia in 1941 was a loose confederation of nation states consisting of southern Slavic people primarily Serbian, Croat and Bosnian. There were numerous other small entities in the Balkans. There was little unity in the country and culturally the existence of family clan feuding was a source of constant friction. It was not until after the conclusion of World War Two that the foremost “Partisan” Comrade Tito assumed control of the reins of government and ruled with an iron fist that was fiercer than the Soviet methods under Stalin. He adapted to a form of Socialism that used Capitalism to drive economic success and dictatorship to keep all of the warring factions into grudging cooperation. The sly resistance leader kept doors open to both the Soviets and to the West walking a tightrope of existence between the two sides of the post-war “Cold War”.