The Yugoslav Partisans, led byJosip Broz Tito, waged a patriotic struggle to liberate the country from foreign occupiers, and the Yugoslav Partisans were the only ones to wage this struggle

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The Partisan movement of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY/KPJ) under the leadership of its General Secretary Josip Broz Tito (of the Roman Catholic Slovenian/Croatian ethnic background) fought in principle for the expulsion of foreign occupation formations from Yugoslavia, but this literally proclaimed struggle was not the main war goal of this movement, but only an incidental means for the realization of the basic political goal of the CPY, which was the seizure of political power over the entire Yugoslavia through armed revolutionary struggle, in order to later, in the post-war period, achieve the ultimate programmatic goal of the CPY of the political-economic-ideological reorganization of Yugoslavia on primarily anti-Serbian and pro-Soviet framework.

In the factual sense of the word, Tito’s Partisans did not fight against the foreign occupier at all during the entire war, and least of all against the Roman Catholic Croat-Muslim Bosniak Ustashi and Croat Home Guard (Domobrani), but only and exclusively against the royalist pro-Yugoslav Ravna Gora Movement ofGeneral Draža Mihailović. This tactical strategy of the communist leadership of the Partisan movement is completely understandable and comprehensible if we know that the main military-political goal of the communists in Yugoslavia was to seize power in the entire country, and this could only be achieved in one way – through military victory over the “enemy“.

However, here a crucial question arises: who were the enemies for the Yugoslav communists that needed to be defeated in order to come to power? From their point of view, the military-political leadership of the Yugoslav communists set the correct strategy of the fight at the very beginning of the war into which they entered after the directive from Moscow, i.e. the Comintern after June 22, 1941, and they adhered to this strategy until the very end of the war. The essence of this, as it turned out to be successful, strategy was reduced to the correct conclusion that the war fate of the Balkans and Yugoslavia was not decided on the Balkans and Yugoslavia themselves, but on the main world fronts, and especially on the Eastern Front, where the main sponsor of the Yugoslav Partisans – the USSR – fought.

Chetnik representatives meeting in Bosnia with Ustaše and Croatian Home Guard officers of the Independent State of Croatia (Public Domain)

Therefore, the Supreme Headquarters with the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia of the Yugoslav Partisans pinned all their hopes on the more or less realistic tactical assumption that Germany would lose the war in the East and, accordingly, that the Soviet Red Army would reach the Balkans and Yugoslavia before the Western Allies, which would mean ade factovictory for the revolutionary communists who would thus seize power in post-war Yugoslavia, as was the case with the eastern part of Central Europe in 1945.

In the above context, no offensive tactics against the Germans and Italians suited the Yugoslav Partisans, since both of them were leaving the territory of Yugoslavia after the Red Army’s breakthrough from the East, which actually happened. Therefore, for the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY/KPJ), the main and only problem was to defeat the only internal enemy that stood in the communists’ way to power and was capable of defeating them on their fanatical path to that power, which was the Ravna Gora movement or the Yugoslav Homeland Army (YHA/JVuO). Therefore, all offensive actions of the Partisans were directed exclusively at the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović, while against the Germans, Italians and armed formations of the Independent State of Croatia, an exclusively defensive struggle was waged if they were attacked by them. An offensive war strategy against the Partisans (and Chetniks) was exclusively requested by Berlin, so that local Germans, Italians and Croatian-Bosniak Ustashi entered into direct battles against the Partisans exclusively at the request, i.e., pressure, from Berlin, while the Ustashi, ​​in alliance with the Partisans, fought an offensive war on a voluntary-agreement basis only against the Chetniks/the Yugoslav Homeland Army.[1]

Throughout Yugoslavia, during the entire period of World War II, the only real fighters against the foreign occupiers and the armed formations of the Nazi Independent State of Croatiawere members of the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland (the Yugoslav Homeland Army or the Chetniks of General Draža Mihailović).Their military-operational strategy was based on the plan that a decisive frontal-direct conflict with the Germans and Italians in the form of a nationwide (Serbian) uprising could only be entered into after the German defeat on one of the main war fronts and then with the Anglo-American military landing in the Balkans, with the hope that this would be on the Yugoslav Adriatic coast.

Source: Global Research