You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is not episode 10.45. This is the research section for episode 10.44, Hope Springs Eternal, part of our continuing series on Yugoslavia's history and the influence it had on Victory Gundam. This is part four, the Yugoslavian uprising during World War II. But if you're just joining us, we are your hosts. I'm Tom and it's my fault we're here today.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam but lacking a funny tagline this week since tag technically it's not a new episode, merely part two of last week's episode. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our honorable and harmonious paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest patrons, Fabian B. Chrdub, 89 Bloomins and Steven N. You keep us a Genki. And extra special thanks to Johnny for supporting us on KO Fi.
I'd like to start the segment this week by locating the war in Yugoslavia, both temporally and geographically, within the larger conflict of World War II. Because Yugoslavia was never more than a secondary theater, a necessary step on the road to other more vital objectives. And for all their desperate struggles, the fates of the millions of people living and fighting in the once and future Yugoslavia were mostly determined by the larger progress of the war. So let's establish a very abbreviated timeline of the events of World War II, starting with the formal beginning of the war in Europe, September 1, 1939. After years of pushing the limits of his neighbor's patience, Hitler finally crosses the line by invading Poland. Russia was warned in advance thanks to the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, and it responded by counter invading Poland from the east, claiming their allotted share of the conquest. But Britain and France, allies of Poland, have finally reached the limit of appeasement and they declare war on Germany. However, neither is ready for war and so for the next six months, while Poland is pillaged and its people massacred, nothing much happens on the Western Front. The Germans hold the line at their borders. The French and British shoot them dirty looks. On November 30, 1939, though, the Soviets invaded Finland, starting the three month long winter War during which both Britain and France made plans to send troops to aid the Finns. They never actually did, but the Nazis got wind of the plan to send Allied troops into northern Europe. Fearing that this could mean the loss of the Swedish iron on which their war industry relied, they decided to move first, on April 7, 1940, the Germans began the invasion of both Denmark and Norway. Despite some setbacks, the Germans had fully occupied both countries by June. They probably could have done it faster, but they had committed a relatively small force to the invasion because the bulk of their combat troops were needed for another the invasion of the Low Countries and the Battle of France. On May 10, Nazi forces stormed into Belgium and the Netherlands, using fast moving mechanized and airborne units to exploit gaps in the defense lines. A month later, they were in Paris and the Italians had joined the war by invading from the south. On June 25, France capitulated. Hitler then turned his attention to the United Kingdom. His navy had taken heavy losses during the invasion of Norway and was in no state to fight the Royal Navy. So he turned to air power to soften the island nation and prepare them for an invasion or else force them to agree to a negotiated peace. Starting in July 1940, the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force dueled in the air over Britain, with the British prevailing in that battle. However, Hitler was forced to cancel the planned invasion and he once again changed his focus. His original grand plan had been to knock off his enemies one by one, protecting his flank and securing access to the land, people and material resources that would be necessary to go toe to toe with his real the Communists. He had planned to invade the Soviet Union in 1943. But with the Brits refusing to cooperate, he decided to skip a couple of steps on the itinerary. Me, personally, I would not be skipping steps on my plan to invade Russia, but maybe that's just hindsight speaking. I mean, it's not like any other European dictators had doomed themselves and their regimes with an ill prepared invasion of Russia before him. Right at the same time that Germany was gearing up for the Battle of Britain, the Soviets were expanding toward the Balkans. In June and July 1940, they seized the regions of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania. France had been the guarantor of Romanian sovereignty, but France, for all intents and purposes, did not exist. In July 1940, Germany, which had significant influence in the region, had already agreed, per the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, to let the Soviets have Bessarabia. But Bukovina was another matter. With a foothold in Bukovina, the Soviets might cut off German access to Romanian oil fields. Oil fields among the most productive in the world at the time, and even more vital to the Nazi war effort than all of those Swedish iron mines. Throughout the summer of 1940, Hitler responded to the Soviet encroachment by strengthening his diplomatic position in the region, mediating disputes between Hungary and Romania, and gradually bringing both, along with neighboring Bulgaria, into the Axis alliance. This really cheesed off his ally, Mussolini, because Hitler had previously prevented him from expanding his sphere of influence into the Balkans. He reacted in a very normal and smart way by invading Greece without warning his allies. On October 28, 1940, Italian troops stationed in the protectorate of Albania poured across the border into Greece. But within a month they were fleeing back across the same border, with Greek troops hot on their heels. The battle lines solidified over the winter, and by spring 1941, both forces were locked into an effective stalemate. The Greeks were backed with supplies and some limited air support from British forces stationed in Cairo. Though it was only a very minor force, it did raise the nightmare possibility that the Allies might land an army in Greece. A second unacceptable threat to the Romanian oil fields. Greece would have to be neutralized. So Hitler began moving troops into position for another lightning assault. Since Yugoslavia is in between Germany and Greece, it would be necessary for them to cooperate. And at first it seemed that they would, just as Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria all had. But as we covered previously, the pro British, anti German coup by Serbian officers on March 27, 1941, convinced Hitler that Yugoslavia could not be trusted. He ordered the troops be peeled off from the invasion force bound for Greece to also destroy Yugoslavia without delay. Ten days later, the Luftwaffe was bombing Belgrade and tanks were rolling across the borders into both Yugoslavia and Greece. As we covered last time, the actual conquest of Yugoslavia in April 1941 was swift and fairly bloodless for the Axis. From an initial invasion force of 337,000, the Germans lost around 150 men killed. But these frontline combat units, among the best in the Nazi army, did not remain in Yugoslavia to keep the peace. With the threat from the Balkans neutralized, they peeled off to join the impending Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. If you look down the list of divisions that were involved in the invasion of Yugoslavia, you'll see some patterns start to emerge. 14th Panzer Division, encircled and destroyed at Stalingrad. 16th Panzer Division encircled and destroyed at Stalyrad. 1st Mountain Division narrowly escaped destruction at Stalingrad. 79th Infantry Division trapped at Stalingrad and forced to surrender. 101st Jaegers encircled in Ukraine and decimated. 183rd infantry, encircled in Ukraine and destroyed. 132nd Infantry. You get the idea. When they left to join Operation Barbarossa, they were replaced by lower quality garrison troops. Initially Only a token force, 30,000 strong, the axis would ultimately be forced to commit around half a million troops to fight the Yugoslav insurgents. There were isolated acts of resistance and even a few small scale uprisings in the first few months of the occupation. But the partisan uprising is traditionally dated to July 7, when a pair of gendarmes from the Serbian collaboration regime tried to arrest the organizers of a pro partisan political rally in a small village in western Serbia. When the organizers refused to surrender themselves, the gendarmes started shooting. But it so happened that the organizers in question were armed partisans themselves. Their leader was a man nicknamed the Spaniard by the other partisans because of his extraordinary love for Spanish culture. He had learned to love Spain during three years of brutal guerilla fighting as a volunteer for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. So when the gendarmes started shooting, he shot back and swiftly killed both of them, took their rifles, gave a rousing anti fascist speech on the steps of the town hall, and then vanished back into the woods with a handful of new recruits in tow. Simultaneous uprisings by other partisan bands broke out all across Yugoslavia, mainly concentrated in Bosnia and around the town of Uzice in western Serbia. The occupation forces in the region were so weak and so unprepared for a mass uprising that the partisans were able to liberate a large self sufficient area that they then called the Uzice Republic. Predictably, the Chetniks were slow to join in. Do you remember the Chetniks? Those were the nationalist resistance groups, mostly based around former members of the army or police forces. In September, Drazha, the Chetnik leader, realized that he was in danger of losing his authority as leader of the resistance if the Chetniks failed to join the uprising. So he committed a token force to help the partisans defend the free zone against German counterattack. That counterattack started in late September. It began with retaliatory killings. Thousands of civilian hostages were executed to punish the rebels and a direct attack on the Republic of Uzice. Despite overwhelming numbers, some 80,000 soldiers, including a tank battalion, against fewer than 20,000 lightly armed partisan rebels, the German advance moved slowly, facing constant harassment in the mountainous terrain. Still, throughout October, the German war machine ground onward. Whenever they took a town or village back from the republic, they would embark on a campaign of bloody vengeance, executing thousands of civilians, including children, and sending tens of thousands more to the camp. The momentum that had favored the partisans originally had now shifted, and with it, Drazha's priorities. Now that partisan success had gone from seeming inevitable to actually very evitable indeed, he did what all great rebel leaders do. He abandoned his convictions, cut a deal with the foreign occupiers and stabbed his former allies in the back. On November 1, Drazha ordered his Chetniks to launch a mass surprise attack against partisan headquarters. Unfortunately for Drazha, the Chetniks were routed in humiliating fashion and chased all the way back to his headquarters, which was soon surrounded. He begged Tito and the rest of the partisan leadership to call off the attack in the name of preventing further fratricidal losses. Unity in the face of the enemy and all that. Tito agreed, but he probably shouldn't have, because two weeks later, Drazha was again making anti partisan alliances with the occupation forces and handing over hundreds of captured partisans to the Germans, who did to them exactly what you would expect. The Chetnik betrayal killed any hope of the partisans maybe possibly being able to hold on to the Republic of Vugice, Tito's staff ordered a general retreat. By December 1941, the occupiers had reclaimed all of the republic, effectively evicting the partisans from Serbia. This battle would come to be known as the first enemy offensive, one of seven large scale attacks made by German occupation forces against resistance strongholds. The second offensive played out just a month after the first, in January 1942. Now in Eastern Bosnia, Here too, the liberated territory was divided between Chetnik and partisan bands. And here too, the Chetniks preferred to abandon their positions rather than fight the Germans. Again, the partisans suffered disproportionate losses against the better equipped and vastly more numerous German forces. But again their leadership and the bulk of their forces were able to slip away and reform elsewhere. News of the Chetnik betrayals travelled slowly. But by the end of the second offensive, cooperation between the two rebel factions had completely broken down and would never be repaired. At this point, much of the partisan movement, especially the part of it in Bosnia, was made up of Serb peasants from fascist Croatia. They had been driven into armed rebellion by the USTAA genocide and had joined the partisans mostly because the partisans were the ones doing the fighting, not because they were committed communists. When Chetnik agitators pretending to be partisans infiltrated their groups to spread a pro Serb, anti Croat, anti Muslim, anti Jewish and anti Communist message, they found receptive audiences. But this propaganda was just the prelude. Chetnik leaders throughout Bosnia made contact with the Germans and established secret agreements to cooperate with them against the partisans. As the partisans deployed in anticipation of another major enemy offensive, the Chetniks went to work. In February 1942, covert Chetnik kill teams began assassinating the leaders and command staff of every partisan combat unit, seizing control for themselves and then executing any known loyalists or Muslims in the ranks. Loyal partisan forces were ambushed and massacred in supposedly friendly territory. Secret partisan hospitals were betrayed, the guards and medical staff slaughtered, the sick and wounded tortured, then executed. On March 13, the Spaniard, the partisan commander who fired the first shots of the uprising, died fighting Chetniks in one such attack in western Serbia. These Chetnik coups continued through May, even as the third enemy offensive descended on what little remained of the partisan movement. Wherever they succeeded, the Chetniks cut deals with the occupiers and joined in the hunt for surviving partisans. This third offensive was the first joint operation by the German and Italian occupation forces and the first one to involve significant forces from the Ustasha, the so called Black Legion. Largely composed of refugees from Bosnia, chased out by Chetniks who were committing anti Bosniak atrocities, the Black Legion now went wild in the recaptured territories, committing the full package of genocidal crimes against humanity, against the Serbs and Jews of the region. There had been almost constant large scale anti insurgency combat since the uprising began in July 1941. But the end of the third offensive in May 1942 marked the beginning of a lull in the fighting. The partisans had been mauled too badly to launch any new offensives, and the Chetniks had mostly come to terms with the occupiers. In June, Tito decided to move further west into the heartland of fascist Croatia. The experience of USTAE tyranny there had made the peasantry sympathetic to the partisan cause, and it might just give them a chance to recover their strength. From Marie Janine Kallik's history of Yugoslavia, four brigades set out in June 1942 on a seemingly never ending and very risky march full of deprivation through the summits and valleys of the Bosnian mountains. For months the ragged figures lived in the forest and slept on the hard ground. Food and medicine were notoriously scarce and ammunition was in acute shortage. Just as it was everywhere. During the march through the ethnically heterogeneous areas in which the Ustasha Chetniks and occupational forces had raged and rampaged one after the other, more and more desperate people joined the People's Liberation Army. In November 1942, the partisans managed to seize the town of Bihac, establishing a new free zone called the Bihach Republic with a population of around 2 million people. There they organized an all Yugoslav assembly, bringing together delegates from a broad spectrum of anti fascist political parties and all the regions of Yugoslavia. In doing so, the partisans benefited significantly from the broader war situation. June 1942 might have been a low point for the partisans, but it marked the beginning of the doomed German assault on Stalingrad. In August, the British forces in North Africa repelled the last of Rommel's attacks. By November, when the partisans were striking the soft underbelly of the ustaa, the German army was in a state of crisis. The Afrika Korps was in full retreat, and the 6th army was encircled by General Zhukov at Stalingrad. In December, American bombers launched their first attacks on the Italian peninsula, hoping to stabilize the situation in Yugoslavia before things got any worse. The Germans, Italians, Ustasha and chetniks launched their fourth massive offensive in January 1943. Once again, the Axis powers brought a vastly superior force, over 100,000 troops with air power, artillery and armor against roughly 20,000 partisan guerrillas. The terms of the offensive were severe. No partisan was to be left alive. Any who were captured or surrendered should be summarily shot. Villages in the area were to be raised and their populations sent to the camps. Real make a desert and call it peace hours. The German plan was for a massive encirclement, a cauldron which could then be slowly tightened until the partisans inside were annihilated. The partisans fought desperately to slow down the offensive enough for their comrades to slip through the gaps in the German line before the noose closed on them. There was fierce fighting for months, attack and counterattack. Axis units thrown back, partisan positions overrun. At one point. The partisans even managed to capture about a dozen light tanks from the Italians and briefly fielded their own armored company. But still the partisans paid a heavy price. More than 10,000 were killed, more than half their original force. And again, wherever the chetniks recaptured a town or village, they set about massacring all of their perceived enemies. By the end of February, the encircling Axis forces had trapped Tito his staff, the partisan mobile hospital, which had in its care more than 3,000 wounded rebels and some 6,000 civilian refugees on the western bank of the Neretva river. The eastern bank was held by 12,000 Chetniks in strong positions, and the Axis forces were closing in from every direction. On March 2, Tito sent sappers to destroy all the remaining bridges across the river, and at the same time, he ordered partisan fighters to attack the German positions to the north, with his staff moving close behind them. German reconnaissance flights saw all of this. Tito's intentions were obvious. The bridges had been destroyed to prevent the chetniks on the other side of the Nuretve from attacking the flanks and rear of the partisan force while they escaped northward. So the Germans began moving forces into place to block the partisan breakout, preparing for a final battle. But during the night, a dozen volunteers crawled across the skeleton of a destroyed railroad bridge and cleared the Chetnik bunkers on the other side with hand grenades. Then they set to work building a makeshift suspension bridge over the river. More troops followed, throwing the Chetniks on the eastern bank into disarray. At that moment, Tito ordered an abrupt halt to the northward attack. His whole column turned 180 degrees around and marched back to the railway bridge as fast as they could manage. The Axis commanders raced to redeploy their troops to block the new move. But it was too late. They were out of position. And only the ill disciplined, poorly motivated Chetniks on the eastern bank stood in the way of partisan escape. One Chetnik commander reported to Drazha that some of the units in his sector publicly declared that they would not fight against their sons, sisters and brothers who were in the ranks of the Communists. When the Communists arrived, Chetniks put down their weapons and greeted them with a fist in the air and the cry Death to fascism. Despite vicious aerial bombing by the Luftwaffe, the partisans once again managed to escape, shattering the Italian and Chetnik units in their way and breaking through into Montenegro with a significant force still intact, all without abandoning their wounded. Immediately, the Axis launched another large scale attack, the fifth offensive. Through May and June 1943, again more than 120,000 Axis soldiers sought to trap the partisans and destroy them in the mountains. Up to this point, the Partisans had received effectively zero international support. In fact, unbelievable though it may sound, considering the narrative you have just heard about large scale Chetnik collaboration with the occupiers and atrocities, the Chetniks were still considered the official representatives of the Allies in Yugoslavia, and they received all the material support the British could sneak into the country. Because you see, the British still recognized the pre war royal government as the legitimate government in exile. And the royal government much preferred the royalist Drazha over the very, very anti royalist communists. If they were hearing ominous rumors about what he was actually doing on the ground, if they had their doubts about his loyalties, well, they had lots of reasons to look the other way. But in May 1943, as the race to escape from the fifth offensive was growing desperate, a message arrived at Partisan be ready to receive a British Special Operations Executive liaison arriving in secret by parachute. At the end of the month, a landing area was arranged a plateau that could be marked by fires in the shape of a cross, and a small force of soldiers was sent to wait in the woods nearby. The margin of error was tiny. The partisans could only afford to wait two nights, and the risks to both sides were immense. If the Luftwaffe saw the signal, they would turn the plateau into a crater. If Axis soldiers found the hidden partisans, they might instead imitate the signal fires and draw the British mission into a deadly ambush. Bad weather on the first night forced them to turn back, dodging German fighter patrols out of Greece. But on the second, the British plane made it through without incident, and the liaison was met by friendly, eager rebels. The leader of that mission, William Deakin, wrote a memoir called the Embattled Mountain about his time with the partisans in Yugoslavia. Of his first encounter with them, he we were now surrounded by a small group of young men, all shouting at once. Each was equipped and armed in a highly individual manner, some in a grayish uniform, others in worn civilian clothes of every variety. A burst of dialogues and questions started up simultaneously. Why hadn't we come before? Where had we come from? How old were we? What were our military ranks? All this and more tumbled out of the straggling knot of youths scampering along beside us, eager and excited at this novel form of meeting. Along the tracks which fringed the edge of the lake, came a file of ponies bearing wounded dummies with hollow faces wrapped in worn blankets, swaying over the rough wooden saddles of the animals. Suddenly we stumbled upon a group of men and women camping in small tents. Girls were moving among them, passing round a meal, and by their dress and manner it seemed for one unreal second that we had encountered a skiing party in some mountain resort. In the center of the glade, seated on a rough hewn ring of tree stumps and fallen boughs, we saw a group of armed men in uniform. One of them stepped forward with an air of natural authority. Slim and neat, in a gray uniform with no badges of rank, he was wearing an army side cap and black riding boots. No names had been revealed in the radio signals which had been received from Montenegro before our departure, and the British had no firm evidence of the identity of the partisan leadership. It was merely known that the commander went under the pseudonym of Tito. The British mission arrived at a critical moment for both sides. The Allies had finally blunted the German offensive and were beginning to prepare for their great counterattack. The partisans were in desperate straits, hemmed in on all sides. Short of everything, they had thousands of wounded, but no medicine, no Ammunition, no food, but what they could scrounge from the desolate mountain forests. They were already eating bark and nettle soup and it was going to get worse. The British Mission was assigned a squad of partisan guards and escorts, and the descriptions of them sound like the cast of a Gundam show. A peasant, probably in his 20s, who joined up after his wife and children were killed. Two 15 year old boys, a music teacher, a carpenter who believed he was fighting to win a new and better world. A lawyer turned journalist who had grown up in England as a refugee after his father was killed in the First World War. In another unit there was an old man who had won the Kara George Star, the Old Kingdom of Serbia's version of the Medal of Honor in that same world war, and then lost all three of his sons fighting the occupiers in this one. Later they would be joined by a spindly old man, one of Croatia's most famous poets, now a delegate to the anti fascist Council of National Liberation. They hid in caves and forests, moving only at night, leaping for cover whenever dive bombers passed overhead. On June 8, at dawn, the Luftwaffe caught the main group amid a grove of birch trees. The British and Tito's staff were caught together in a bombing run. More than a hundred men were killed, including one of the liaison officers. Tito took a bomb splinter through his shoulder. The partisan leader probably would have died, except that at the last second his huge German shepherd had thrown its own body across him and taken the killing blow in his place. They crept on through the black forests of the night, soft footed scouts cutting the throats of sleepy German sentries so the rest of the dwindling column could pass through gaps in the lines. Somewhere ahead, the advance units were fighting desperately on mountaintops to prevent the Neuse from closing. A message arrived in camp from one of as long as you hear the firing of our rifles, the Germans will not pass. But when there is no more sound, then you will know that there are no more communist proletarians alive. They passed between German bunkers barely a kilometer separating their march column from the enemy positions. A sudden attack closed the gap only 15 minutes after the last of the command group made it through. A little way down the road they passed three light tanks, all of them destroyed. One of the partisans had ignored the order to destroy or abandon heavy equipment and had secretly carried his beloved anti tank rifle, spoils of a prior battle against the Italian army throughout the whole retreat. That night, lying in a ditch waiting for a German patrol to pass, he spotted a formation of three tanks and he happened to have exactly three shells. Somehow, more than 10,000 fighters had escaped from the fifth offensive, but thousands were still trapped behind them, starving, exhausted, fighting on without hope. Among them were many small groups of wounded who could not be moved over the rugged terrain. Doctors and nurses had stayed behind to tend them, but the Germans used police dogs and local collaborators to hunt them down and executed all. They found wounded soldiers and unarmed medics alike. Then they used the same tactics to kill all the civilians they could find. The area had been too friendly to the partisans, and so it would be scourged. And there, at perhaps their lowest point. We will stop for today, but we'll pick up the story of the partisans of Yugoslavia next week on episode 10.45.
Next time we really truly will be on to episode 10.45, two wings and a Prayer. We will research and discuss victory gundam episode 45 and eh, you know the rest. Please listen to it.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseated land of the Lenape people. People and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dayoxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsgundampodcast.com or or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us [email protected] Patreon you can find links and more ways to help [email protected] support. Thank you for listening.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our generous and genial paying subscribers. Oh wait, that's what I said last week. Yeah, you did. Generous and genial before complimentary adjectives that. Start with H. Honest, hard working, humble, humanitarian, humane. Oh no. Then as now, Swedish metal is a vital resource. Should I actually include that one? I don't know. Go say maybe pop that into the outtakes. Elsewhere. Chetnik Unix Chetnik Unix. The eunuchs are uprising. The dog was named Tiger.
You're gonna make me cry. H was hard. Lots of good negative adjectives start with H, but positive ones appropriate to this situation.