Gebruiker:Francis Tyers/Sandbox

vanuit Wikipedia, die vrye ensiklopedie.

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

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.

The Partisans and the People's Liberation Army fought a guerrilla campaign which enjoyed gradually increased levels of support among the population. People's committees were organised to act as civilian governments in liberated areas of the country, and even limited arms industries were established.

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 the 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 the Second World War in 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, UstaĊĦe, Chetniks and Bulgarian forces.

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 land.