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The essay at hand covers the operations on the southern flank of the German front in Yugoslavia from October 1944 to April 1945. During this period, the Germans managed to extricate their XXI Mountain Corps from virtual encirclement on two occasions (in Montenegro and the Bosna River Valley) and ultimately reinforce their hard-pressed main line in the Balkans with this battered, but still battle-worthy, formation. This article will provide the reader with a brief description of this little-known campaign and explain the reasons behind what was probably the Yugoslav Partisans’ greatest “lost victory” of the war. The main argument is that such an outcome was largely the result of the Yugoslav leadership’s refusal to award sufficient attention to this sector of the front and the internal political considerations, but also of the German army’s skillfully conducted defense. The article will also dwell on the battlefield effectiveness of both sides, and the Partisans’ efforts to become a regular army in both their outlook and operational manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between autumn 1943 and autumn 1944, the Wehrmacht's 2nd Panzer Army applied novel methods to stem the ever-growing tide of Yugoslavia's partisan movement. During the first two years of the uprising, the German doctrine for combating the guerrillas was based almost entirely on brute force; in battlefield terms, this amounted to persistent use of classic large-scale encirclement operations aimed at breaking particularly dangerous enemy concentrations. After it had become clear that this wasn't working, the Germans slowly began applying a more diversified approach in late 1943, including more reliance on small unit tactics, flexible operational planning, and subversive propaganda. Although initially successful, these methods came too late to make a strategic impact on the course of the Yugoslavia campaign. Furthermore, they could not offset the effects of Berlin's long-standing refusal to dedicate more resources to this secondary theater of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eastern parts of Yugoslavia were the site of savage fighting between October and December 1944, as the German Army Group E tried to force its way out of an almost desperate situation it had found itself in following the evacuation of Greece. Against all odds, this huge German formation managed to best three Allied armies, rugged terrain, and autumn rains and reach the relative safety of the Independent State of Croatia, where it joined the remainder of the Axis front in the Balkans. Although this dramatic episode had been extensively written about in the former Yugoslavia and Germany, it received next to no attention in the English-speaking academic community. The article at hand will provide an overview and an analysis of military operations based on a wide plethora of primary and secondary sources of all sides. It will also argue that the ultimate success of the breakthrough was as much due to the unwillingness of the Soviet high command to devote more resources to the Balkan Front, and the structural weaknesses of the Bulgarian and Yugoslav Partisans’ armies, as it was to the battlefield prowess of the Wehrmacht. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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On 16 October 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a parade in Belgrade marking the 70th anniversary of its liberation by the Red Army and the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisans. In addition to being a public display of the historic bonds and mutual friendship between the two states, the event also symbolically reaffirmed the role of the Yugoslav Partisans in these operations by parading their old battle flags. In light of strong revisionist tendencies in the past 25 years that sought to diminish or even deny the Partisans’ contribution to the liberation of the country, this represents a small but important gesture. The aim of this article will be to provide an overview of operations in Serbia from late September to late October 1944, to quantify the Partisans’ contribution to the campaign, and to briefly discuss Soviet-Yugoslav cooperation during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines operations 'Weiss' and 'Schwarz,' two of the largest anti-guerrilla sweeps conducted by the German Wehrmacht during the entire Second World War. Four reinforced divisions with ca. 65,000 German soldiers and up to 100 aircraft took part in what is regarded as the most ferocious fighting of the whole war in Yugoslavia. Although conducted with maximum effort in material terms, they were doomed to failure because of the Third Reich's neglect of guerrilla warfare and the resulting lack of a sound counter-insurgency doctrine. Remarkably, operations 'Weiss' and 'Schwarz' are almost unknown to the public in the West, despite their sheer size. As the founding myths of socialist Yugoslavia, they were extensively written about, almost always from a Partisan perspective. This is the first article to describe the events from the German point of view, and to analyze the Wehrmacht's conduct of these operations in some depth. With the ongoing COIN campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, examining the lessons from the past can prove enlightening. 'Black' on 'White': Operations in Yugoslavia, January - June 1943 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]