The Balkan Crucible: An Axis Yugoslavia AAR

[The Living Hive]

The Balkan Crucible: An Axis Yugoslavia AAR

“And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” – Matthew 12:25

Hello, and welcome to my third try at producing a Hearts of Iron IV AAR. After my last two attempts were aborted by updates in the mod that I was using, I am taking a different tack for this AAR by relying solely on the (recently updated) base game and the Player-Led Peace Conferences mod.

In any case, what will follow is a story of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, one of the unfortunate children of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. Consisting of the various South Slav populations in the Balkans, Yugoslavia was never able to solidify a coherent national identity and fell apart in a matter of days when the Axis powers came knocking in 1941. But with the aid of a national focus tree and hours spent on Wikipedia, this AAR will try and look at how a more unified Yugoslav nation could have been formed and what effect it might have had on World War II. I hope that you will enjoy this story as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing it.

The first chapter will lay out a brief history of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the second will focus on the situation facing the Kingdom in 1936, and then we will get into the thick of things.

Table of Contents
Chapter One: What Wilson Wrought, Part One: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia Since the Great War (January 1st, 1936)
Chapter Two: What Wilson Wrought: The Situation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1936, Part Two: The Present Situation of the Kingdom (January 1st, 1936)
Chapter Three: Initial Disturbances (January 1st, 1936 to March 11th, 1936)
Chapter Four: Le Virage à Droite (March 7th, 1936 to April 26th, 1936)
Chapter Five: The Opening Salvo (April 26th, 1936 to September 2nd, 1936)
Chapter Six: The Balance of Power, Part One (September 26th, 1936 to July 14th, 1937)
Chapter Seven: The Balance of Power, Part Two (September 26th, 1936 to July 14th, 1937)
Chapter Eight: The Concordat (July 14th, 1937 to December 2nd, 1937)
Chapter Nine: Another Damned Foolish Thing in the Balkans (December 2nd, 1937 to March 18th, 1938)
Chapter Ten: The Unexpected War (March 18th, 1938 to June 25th, 1938)
Chapter Eleven: A Cacophony of War (June 25th, 1938 to December 1st, 1938)
Chapter Twelve: All Roads Lead to Rome (December 1st, 1938 to June 5th, 1939)
Chapter Thirteen: Reaping the Whirlwind (June 5th, 1939 to October 20th, 1939)

Chapter One: What Wilson Wrought, Part One: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia Since the Great War (January 1st, 1936)

Yugoslavia emerged from the Great War with almost all of its territorial claims satisfied, but as Europe drifted towards another disastrous war, enemies from within and outside of the kingdom threatened to upend the map of the Balkans once again.


Serbia in the First World War

“You are going into battle against a new enemy – dangerous, tough, fearless, and sharp. You are going to the Serbian front and Serbia. Serbs are people who love their freedom, and who will fight to the last man.” – German Field Marshal August von Mackensen

After Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia on July 28th, 1914. The war became a global conflict as both sides called allies to their sides. Early in the war, Austria made three attempts to invade Serbia, each of which were repelled by valiant Serb and Montenegrin soldiers.

After a year of licking their wounds, the Austrians enlisted their German and Bulgarian allies to launch a massive invasion of Serbia in the fall of 1915. This time, the Central Powers were successful. The Serbian army and government were forced to make a frightful retreat to Greece through the mountains of Montenegro and Albania. The losses of the Great Retreat were devastating to the Royal Serbian Army, and the civilian population of Serbia was left at the mercy of oppressive Austrian and Bulgarian occupations. When Serbia was liberated three years later by a combined Entente force, it was a ruined country with a brutalized people. Over one-fifth of the population of Serbia died during the Great War from war and disease, and the country needed years to rebuild. But the suffering of Serbia paved the way for the creation of a united homeland for the South Slav people.


The Birth of Yugoslavia

Although Yugoslavia was conceived in the hearts of South Slavs, it was born in Paris with the negotiations and treaties that ended the Great War.

The idea of unifying the South Slav peoples into one state dated back centuries. Initially, the Croatian-led Illyrian movement was the primary driver for the creation of Yugoslavia, but after Serbia gained her independence from the Ottoman Empire, Belgrade became a magnet for the South Slavs struggling under the yoke of their foreign masters. Yugoslavism remained a pipe dream until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

As the Hapsburg Empire collapsed during the close of the Great War, the Serbian government was confronted with events that demanded a response. To preclude Italian ambitions on the Adriatic coast, the Kingdom of Serbia agreed to a hasty petition by the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs to unite with Serbia and Montenegro. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was founded on December 1st, 1918.

From the beginning, the young Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was faced with challenges of how to integrate the lands gained from Austria-Hungary and how the new state should be constituted. Was it to be a confederation or a unitary state? How was power to be balanced between the different constituent people of the kingdom? Was there one common Yugoslav character or merely a collection of different ethnic identities? These debates would continue to dominate the internal politics of the kingdom and destabilize the country even as the nations beyond her borders hungrily eyed the lands of the South Slav homeland.


Initial Challenges to the Kingdom

Italy’s territorial claims were wide-ranging and ambitious, and the failure to achieve them following the World War gave rise to an aggressive regime under Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party.

The domestic situation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was a disharmonious one from the outset. The different peoples in the new state immediately set out jockeying for power and influence. Any benefit accrued by another’s group was seen as the disenfranchisement of one’s own. The chief rivalry within the kingdom was between the Croats and Serbs, and the politics within the country revolved around their rivalry.

Generally, Serbs were in favor of a centralized state apparatus that concentrated power in Belgrade and maintained the Serb predominance in the economy, the government, and the military. This was the form of government preferred by King Alexander I and his advisors, but it was opposed by the other ethnic groups and more liberal-minded Serbs. They wanted the kingdom to devolve powers to the different regions and give a greater voice to the non-Serb ethnic groups within the country. The centralizers feared that these moves would lead to secession and destroy the country. On the other hand, keeping the Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians within the kingdom in a second-class position was only fueling radicalization and violence. Every year organizations like the Croat Ustaše and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization grew larger and bolder.

Apart from the ethnic strife within Yugoslavia, there was also the matter of Communist activities within the kingdom. Directed by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Moscow and capitalizing on economic and social unrest within the country, the Communists were organizing and growing in strength in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. The first President of the Constituent Assembly, serving from 1920 to 1922, was, in fact, a Communist. In response to the inroads being made among his subjects and a wave of Communist-led strikes, King Alexander I cracked down on the Communist movement in Yugoslavia, driving it underground but not extinguishing the revolutionary fervor of the country’s hardened fighters and ideologues.

Italian entry into World War One was preceded by a bidding war between the Entente and the Central Powers, resulting in the abortive 1915 Treaty of London which promised Rome large swathes of the Dalmatian coast.

There was also danger outside of the South Slav homeland as well. In addition to the claims on Yugoslav territory by the defeated countries of Hungary and Bulgaria, there was the menace posed by Serbia’s wartime ally, the Kingdom of Italy. Italy had been on the winning side of the Great War, but the decision by the other Entente powers to award the Dalmatian coast to the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes infuriated Italian nationalists. Despite the ethnographic and economic considerations that settled the decision, Rome argued that the area’s sizable Italian minority, ties to the Roman Empire, and the large number of Italian dead justified their claim. Italy did not walk away from the peace conference empty-handed, however. The Austrian littoral of Istria was granted to Italy despite its South Slav population, as was the enclave of Zara right in the middle of the Yugoslav coast. Still, the Italians wanted more, and once Benito Mussolini and his Fascist movement came to power in 1923, he was quick to make expansionism a centerpiece of his totalitarian regime.

Yugoslav territorial integrity was maintained by security treaties with France and as a part of two semi-formal alliances directed against other countries with designs on Yugoslav territories. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was a member of both the Little Entente with Czechoslovakia and Romania, which was directed against Hungarian revanchism, and the Balkan Pact with Greece, Romania, and Turkey, which aimed at preventing Bulgarian aggression. This multilateral security policy initially seemed to be working as designed, but as the years went by, the World War seemed evermore distant and these pledges of assistance seemed increasingly hollow.


Building a Nation and Building a State

Until his untimely death, King Alexander I oversaw the construction of the Yugoslav state. Although an active proponent of Yugoslavia’s security in international matters, the king was ill-equipped to handle the challenges his kingdom faced at home.

The proponents of a united Yugoslav kingdom envisioned Serbia under the royal House of Karađorđević playing a similar role to that of the kingdoms of Piedmont or Prussia during the unifications of Italy and Germany respectively. Serbia was to be the nucleus around which a new national identity would be formed. Serbian history, institutions, and culture would be the center of gravity for a broader Yugoslav identity that drew the identities of other South Slav peoples into its orbit and incorporated them. But the process of uniting Yugoslavia was complicated by the differences between the new country’s subjects. With self-determination of ethnic groups the new litmus test for European legitimacy in the post-war world, movements for secession and autonomy were a constant threat to the unity of the young Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Demographically, it was difficult for the Serb section of the Kingdom to exert its will on the rest of Yugoslavia. Together, Serbs and Montenegrins made up 38.8 percent of the population of the kingdom, followed by Croats at 23.9 percent, Slovenes at 8.5 percent, Bosnian Muslims at 6.3 percent, Macedonians at 5.3 percent, and lastly Albanians at 4 percent. This situation would have been a difficult one to manage for any leader, but for King Alexander I, the ruler of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes during this tumultuous period, it was a challenge wholly unsuited for his talents and temperament.

Stjepan Radić, the leader of the Croat Peasant Party, led the opposition against the centralizing policies of King Alexander and his government.

Considered a war hero by his countrymen for his role in the Great War, Alexander thought of himself primarily as a soldier and as a Serb. It was not until Serbia had passed through the darkest days of 1917 that Alexander finally endorsed the idea of Yugoslavia. Even as the ruler of this new state, Alexander believed that the kingdom needed to be maintained as a unitary state lest federalization or secession lead to discrimination against the sizable minorities of Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. He preferred to surround himself with generals rather than politicians, leading to a fractious relationship between the sovereign and the Yugoslav parliament, the skupština. This boiled over following the assassination of Stjepan Radić, the leader of the Croat Peasant Party and the “uncrowned king of Croatia” in 1928. Following two years of measures by Radić and other leaders of the opposition to obstruct parliamentary sessions in order to agitate for a federal Yugoslavia, a Montenegrin deputy shot Radić dead on the floor of the skupština.

The resulting unrest brought Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war. Alexander even briefly considered letting Croatia secede peacefully from Yugoslavia. Ultimately, however, the king decided to try and save Yugoslavia instead of letting it fall apart. After his first choice of the Croat Vladko Maček turned down the post of prime minister, Alexander approached a Slovene Catholic, Father Anton Korošec, and formed a new government with the sole aim of holding Yugoslavia together. To that end, a dictatorship was proclaimed on 1929, which abolished the constitution of the kingdom, suspended elections, curtailed freedoms of speech and assembly, and dissolved all political parties except for the Yugoslav National Party. This party embodied Alexander’s desired program of Yugoslav nationalism, centralization, and secularization. These measures were followed in 1931 by the adoption of the September Constitution, which reestablished elections and a legislature and attempted to establish a common national identity within the kingdom. Under this new constitution, the country was renamed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the country’s internal administration was reorganized from thirty-three districts to nine banovinas. These new governates were based on rivers rather than ethnic or religious divisions.

Whatever his personal reservations might have been, Alexander himself made several efforts at uniting the Yugoslavia. The September Constitution vested much more power in the position of the king than the previous one had, and Alexander readily used his new powers. He created a new flag for the unified kingdom, attempted to ban the use of Serbian Cyrillic in favor of a single Latin alphabet, and established a single legal code, fiscal code, and Yugoslav Agrarian Bank. Furthermore, Alexander also took his vacations in Slovenia, named his second son after a Croat king, and became a godfather to a Bosnian Muslim child. The royal dictatorship may have severely curtailed political and civic liberties in the Kingdom, but it enabled the king to take strong, decisive actions to try and save his Kingdom from dissolution.

Despite all of these measures, Belgrade’s reach was limited to a great deal by the inadequate Yugoslav education system. Officially, half of the Kingdom’s population was literate, but it varied widely by population with Slovenes the most literate and Bosnian Muslims and Macedonians the least. Without a unified system of compulsory schooling, different ethnic groups could not identify with or assimilate to a common Yugoslav nation because many of them were not even aware that such a thing existed.


The Great Depression in Yugoslavia

Even in 1936, much of Yugoslavia’s population was rural and employed in agriculture. Little had changed for the peasantry between Serbian independence and the onset of the First World War.

“In our free state there can and will only be free landowners,” Alexander had declared and accordingly one of his first acts as ruler of the new kingdom was a decree breaking up the large feudal estates in Yugoslavia. In Croatia and Slovenia, land was redistributed from the now expelled Austrian and Hungarian nobles to the peasants. In Bosnia and Macedonia, however, the wealthy Muslim gentry that were targeted by the land reform were still present and complained bitterly about this attack on their personal wealth and political influence. Nonetheless, the land reform was largely successful and it served the kingdom well. With the Yugoslav economy focused primarily on agriculture, land reform and the concurrent mechanization of farming practices helped to boost Yugoslav exports of foodstuffs to the rest of Europe.

A large amount of money was borrowed from Yugoslavia’s wartime allies in the west in order to fund this agricultural modernization, but the cost of these loans soon came to outpace their benefits. The kingdom’s ability to pay back French and British loans was greatly hindered by the worldwide economic depression that started with a stock market crash in the United States. Furthermore, worldwide overproduction of food had caused the price of Yugoslavia’s primary exports to plummet while at the same time her trading partners were focused on supporting their own farmers rather than foreigners.

Relief came to Yugoslavia from an unexpected source: Germany. With her growing population and the loss of rich agricultural land to neighboring Poland, Serbia’s one-time enemy had a voracious appetite for cereals. The change from a semi-democratic government to a National Socialist one did not change this fact and, by the mid-1930’s, Germany was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s single largest trading partner. Yugoslav food and mineral resources helped fuel the revival of Germany, and finished goods, technical knowhow, and capital investment flowed from Berlin to Belgrade in return.

However, even as the sluggish Yugoslav economy started to show signs of recovery, the kingdom’s deepening ties with Germany attracted serious scrutiny from the domestic establishment and foreign powers. To shore up the traditional alliance with France, Alexander made an official state visit to Paris in 1934 only for it to end in tragedy.


The Assassination of King Alexander

The shocking murder of King Alexander and the French Foreign Minister took place in broad daylight in the presence of news cameras.

Between heavy-handed attempts at integrating the people of Yugoslavia, the curtailment of political liberties, and the economic downturn, Alexander had suffered a steady erosion of his popularity. This was most notable in Serbia, the supposed stronghold of the regime. Before the imposition of the royal dictatorship, the king had enjoyed visiting ordinary people in villages all over Yugoslavia. Afterwards, however, these impromptu tours had to be curtailed out of fear that an assassin would use them to strike down the king. Between Communist activists, disgruntled Serbs, and Ustaše and IMRO terrorists, there was no shortage of potential enemies.

The Ustaše was the gravest of these threats, with a large sea of Croats in which to hide. The separatists also enjoyed the clandestine support of the Italian and Hungarian governments, which provided the Ustaše with refuge, arms, and training in hopes of gaining territory at Yugoslavia’s expense in the resulting chaos. By 1933, the Ustaše had assassinated hundreds of government employees and had blown up hundreds of trains in the kingdom.

The Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini, believed that Alexander was the only thing holding the Yugoslavia together. Once he was gone, the country would descend into a civil war and Italy could then annex the territory it desired. With that goal in mind, Rome cooperated with the Ustaše and the IMRO to form a team to assassinate the king during his state visit in Paris. Vlado Chernozemski, a Bulgarian IMRO activist, with the help of three Croat accomplices, assassinated King Alexander and the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou on the streets of the City of Lights before being killed himself by the outraged crowd.

An art collector and cousin to the slain king, it fell to Prince Paul to steward Yugoslavia and to keep the kingdom together after Alexander’s demise.

Mussolini’s scheming did not bear fruit, however. The kingdom proved stronger than expected and Yugoslavia did not fall apart with the death of its king. After his father’s assassination, the crown passed to the underage Peter II, then only eleven years old. In accordance to Alexander’s will, his cousin, Prince Paul, headed a regency council that would govern Yugoslavia until Peter reached the age of majority.

Any hope that the shocking assassination would reinvigorate the alliance between France and Yugoslavia proved ill-founded as well. Despite the murder of both an allied monarch and the country’s own foreign minister, the assassin’s accomplices were imprisoned rather than executed by the French government. Behind the scenes, London and Paris both put pressure on Belgrade to refrain from publicly blaming Mussolini and Italy for the assassination so as to avoid jeopardizing the proposed Stresa Front against Germany. Even though the slain Alexander’s last words were, “Save Yugoslavia, and the friendship with France”, Paul and the people of Yugoslavia never forgot the treatment of their country by her so-called allies and protectors.

 

[Bullfilter]

Off to a thoughtful and well put together start. Looking forward to where you take this.

 

[Captured Joe]

This has potential, I'm just hoping you will portray Prince pavle better than PDX does...

 

[Cromwell]

Very interesting, I'm looking forwards to this.

 

[The Living Hive]

Off to a thoughtful and well put together start. Looking forward to where you take this.

Thank you very much, I'm glad to have you aboard!

This has potential, I'm just hoping you will portray Prince pavle better than PDX does...

Thank you, I am hoping to do him some justice. I've read some of your comments on the regrettable situation with Prince Paul while lurking, so I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts about where I take things.

Very interesting, I'm looking forwards to this.

Thank you, I hope I can live up to the hype!

Working on formatting and uploading images, next chapter should be up shortly.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Two: What Wilson Wrought: The Situation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1936, Part Two: The Present Situation of the Kingdom (January 1st, 1936)

Domestic Politics

Without a proper king, the task of guiding the fractious country fell to the three men of the Regency Council.

Prince Paul and the Regency Council

Since the death of Alexander I, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was ruled by a regency council which was set to hold power until King Peter’s eighteenth birthday. Although nominally an equal triumvirate, the council was unofficially headed by the slain king’s cousin, Prince Paul of the House of Karađorđević, with the tacit consent of the other regents, Radenko Stanković and Ivo Perović. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Paul was a noted Anglophile and man of culture, whose collection of paintings included some by Monet, Titian, and van Gogh. By 1936, his rule had seen some moves towards undoing the regime of censorship and political control employed by Alexander I, as well as efforts to reconcile Yugoslavia’s Serb and Croatian communities. The prince was hindered in these projects by his reluctance to use the powers granted to the head of state by the September Constitution and his desire to hand the kingdom over to Peter as unchanged as possible.

The Politics of the Kingdom

[Milan Stojadinović] is “our sincere friend… a strong, full-bodied man with a resonant laugh and a strong handshake… a man who inspires confidence… Of all the political men I have encountered so far in my European wanderings, he is the one I find most interesting” – Count Ciano, foreign minister of Italy

While Prince Paul was reluctant to seize power, Yugoslavia’s prime minister, Milan Stojadinović, had far fewer compunctions. After serving as a finance minister in previous governments, Stojadinović was appointed to head the kingdom’s government on June 24th, 1935 in order to combat the issues of Croatian unrest and the lingering effects of the Great Depression in the kingdom. As the head of the Yugoslav Radical Union, Stojadinović attempted to weld together the different ethnic constituencies of the kingdom into one political movement, and found a measure of success in that regard with his Yugoslav Radical Union, although the Croats remained outside of it. On the economic front, he was more successful, pursuing closer economic ties with the German Reich. The exchange of agricultural products and minerals for capital and finished goods led to a revival of the Yugoslav economy, but critics at home and abroad were worried about the kingdom being unable to escape the German orbit.

Milan Stojadinović has made no secret of his admiration for his Italian counterpart, Benito Mussolini, or his ambitions to fulfill a similar role in Yugoslavia. Unlike the Italian National Fascist Party and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party which inspired its creation, however, the Yugoslav Radical Union was actually a coalition of organizations including the Serb Radical Party, the Yugoslav Muslim Organization and the Slovene People’s Party. Its ideology was one of Yugoslav nationalism, anti-Communism, corporatism, and mass mobilization of the Yugoslav masses, but some regarded it primarily as a vehicle for Stojadinović’s own personal aggrandizement and enrichment.

Although less radical than his predecessor, Vladko Maček was still an outspoken proponent for Croat interests in Yugoslavia, constantly putting him at odds with the government in Belgrade.

The chief opposition to the Stojadinović government came from the Croatian Peasant Party, with Vladko Maček succeeding as its leader after Stepan Radic’s assassination, and even being offered the post of prime minister in 1932. Some of Stojadinović’s measures were also opposed by the rump Yugoslav National Party, at one time the only legal party in Yugoslavia under Alexander I’s dictatorship. After the Yugoslav Radical Union split off from the National Party in 1935, its leaders were relegated to the sidelines as their ideology of Yugoslav nationalism, centralization, and secularization was largely adopted by the government. Some of the National Party’s members were drawn to the Yugoslav Democratic Union, although that party was riven with internal conflict between advocates of a unitary and a federalist Yugoslavia.

Finally, there was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Despite being formally banned, the Yugoslav Communists were able to attract disaffected workers and ethnic minorities across the kingdom, although its vision of central control of the party took cues from the Communist Party of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, which also supplied funding and direction.

The Yugoslav constitution of 1931 established elections with universal suffrage for males over the age of twenty-one, but there was no provision for secret ballots, with the result being the employees were encouraged to vote for the same parties and candidates as their employer. Most notably this extended into the government sphere, with support for the Radical Union bolstered by the votes of public employees. Parliamentarians sat in a bicameral legislature, with both appointed and elected senators serving six-year terms and members of the Chamber of Deputies serving four-year terms. The king, or the regent, was able to dismiss parliament, call for election, and introduce legislation as well as appoint senators, ministers, and governors.

Ethnic Unrest and Separatism

A group of Croat children in national costume. Even after nearly two decades of rule by Belgrade, many ethnic groups failed to be reconciled to their status as subjects of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although differing in their aims and tactics, they largely agreed on the unacceptability of the status quo.

While none of the ethnic groups that make up Yugoslavia were perfectly content with the current state of affairs in 1936, the Croats were a particularly thorny group. The second largest ethnic group in the kingdom and divided from Serbs by religion, history, and geography, most Croat leaders pushed for either greater autonomy within Yugoslavia or outright independence. The most worrying aspect of this unrest was been the rise of the Ustaše terrorist organization which aimed for the establishment of an independent “Greater Croatia” through acts of violence. Belgrade’s efforts to crackdown on the Ustaše had proved inconclusive due to the group’s backing by foreign governments in Rome and Budapest who supplied the Ustaše with weapons, training, and refuge. Furthermore, attempts to endear the kingdom to her Croat subjects risked raising the ire of Serbian chauvinists, especially in the military.

The second most troublesome minority group within Yugoslavia’s borders was the Macedonians, who resisted accepting a Yugoslav identity and demanded special rights instead. Just as the Croats had the Ustaše with its Italian and Hungarian support, the Macedonians had the Bulgarian-backed Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, IMRO, which sought to unite the Macedonian regions of Yugoslavia with Bulgaria. Along with its sister organization in Greece, the Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organization, or ITRO, was supplied and funded by territorial revisionists in the Bulgarian government.

Although less violent than the resistance shown by the Croat and Macedonian populations, the Slovene threat to the unity of Yugoslavia was in a way a more insidious one. Whereas the other troublesome groups freely expressed their hatred of the kingdom and the Yugoslav ideology, Slovenes, especially the upper classes, treated it with apathy. Although Slovenia was the richest part of the country in 1936, little of that wealth flowed to the rest of the kingdom. Slovene investors and industrialists preferred to either operate within Slovenia or abroad, even at a time when the Yugoslav economy needed all the help it could receive from her citizens. Furthermore, there was even some push for uniting Yugoslav Slovenia with the Slovenes of the Italian-ruled Istrian peninsula, creating more friction between Belgrade and Rome.

The Yugoslav Economy

Since 1929, the Czech vz. 24 rifle had been the workhouse of the Royal Yugoslav Army. Like most finished products in the kingdom, however, it had been manufactured and purchased from abroad.

By 1936, the Yugoslav economy had largely recovered from the ravages of the worldwide Great Depression, but this success was achieved at the cost of a growing dependency on German goodwill and by continuing to specialize in agricultural products at the expense of industrial development. With war on the horizon, it was more important than ever that the kingdom drag herself into the modern era of steel and electricity. The protectionist moves by Yugoslavia’s nominal ally France and the drying up of both French and Czech supplies of arms highlighted the need for the kingdom to develop her own domestic arms industry. In an unconscious mimicry of the Bolshevik regime in Russia, talks abounded in Belgrade of supplementing agricultural exports with ramped up exploitation of the country’s rich mineral deposits in order to purchase the necessary equipment and expertise for industrialization. Maps circulated showing proposed sites for factories, and even some deputies of the Croatian Peasant Party registered their interest. However, such plans were not in accord with those of Stojadinović, who, in addition to his powers as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister still held a great deal of sway over his former subordinates in the Finance Ministry. Too aggressive an armament campaign could risk antagonizing Rome or Berlin, Stojadinović argued, and at just the moment when his dogged diplomatic efforts were finally bearing fruit.

The Yugoslav Military

“The Serbians, seasoned, war-hardened men, inspired by the fiercest patriotism, the result of generations of torment and struggle, awaited undaunted whatever fate might bestow.” – Winston Churchill

The Royal Serb Army had brought victory to the kingdom during the Balkan Wars and had bravely resisted the efforts of the Central Powers to subjugate the small country during the World War. Its grim retreat through Montenegro and Albania, and its triumphant return had hardened the men of the army and boosted the already-high prestige of the armed forces to dizzying heights. The Royal Serb Army had formed the nucleus of the Royal Yugoslav Armed Forces when the South Slavs were united into one kingdom.

Beneath this glorious story of triumph over adversity lurked significant structural problems. The performance of Serbia in wartime had always depended more on the courage of her soldiers more than her ability to supply them. One-third of the men called up in August 1914 lacked rifles or ammunition, and new recruits were asked to supply their own boots and clothing due to a shortage of uniforms. Despite the greater resources of the unified Yugoslavia, as late as 1937 the army continued to lack the means to field and supply an army capable of defending the kingdom from all of its covetous neighbors. Deficits in funding, material, and infrastructure, as well as contentious debates over which border to focus on, left the Yugoslav army unable to conduct large-scale maneuvers, leaving military tactics to stagnate. Advances in technology also bypassed the country; not only were artillery pieces and airplanes in short supply, but when soldiers did have rifles, they often dated back to before the Great War. As noted earlier, Yugoslavia’s lack of domestic manufacturing left it reliant on French and Czech imports of rifles, artillery pieces, and airplanes for her army, but as European tensions rose those countries began to delay or withhold deliveries with an eye towards preparing their own forces for war.

As a result, at the start of 1936, the Royal Yugoslav Armed Forces were overworked, underequipped, and outmatched. The once proud army that had liberated Serbia from occupation by the Central Powers in the Great War had been the victim of budget cuts, political drama, and the ethnic conflict that seemed to permeate every aspect of the kingdom. It was unable to field enough divisions to defend all of the Kingdom’s threatened frontiers, and the assurances that the spirit of the Yugoslav soldier could overcome material deficiencies rang increasingly hollow as Italian forces swept across Abyssinia with modern planes, trucks, and tanks.

A key advantage to any aggressor against Yugoslav was the fractious domestic situation in the kingdom. Foreign armies might enjoy the support of irreconciled ethnic groups in some of the areas of Yugoslavia most vulnerable to attack. The overwhelmingly Serb nature of the Royal Yugoslav Army hindered its ability to earn the trust of the kingdom’s other constituencies and to operate in Croatian or Macedonian regions of the country. The loyalty of Serbs to the state was generally far more assured than that of the Croats, Slovenes, or Macedonians, but this reduced the army’s pool of recruits and officers and made a mockery of Belgrade’s efforts to build a common Yugoslav identity. Some reformers believed that the royal army could do more to serve as “the school of the nation”, as was the norm in other nation-states, by increasing contacts between the different people of our country and instilling in them the values of and a sense of belonging to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The old guard of military leadership, on the other hand, pointed to the wave of Communist, Croat, and Macedonian terrorism that the Kingdom was suffering. The army was no place for social engineering, they argued. Better to rely on the proven loyalty of Serbs than to run the risk of arms and training being diverted to secessionists and other hostile forces.

The staunch loyalists of the Yugoslav general staff and other high-ranking Serb officers provided valuable support and legitimacy to the government in Belgrade, but their unwillingness to adapt in the face of a changing country and a changing world threatened hinder the defense of Yugoslavia in any future war. Behind closed doors, some parliamentarians grumbled that the military leadership was fat and happy atop a walking corpse of an army.

The Royal Yugoslav Army

The General Staff was popularized by the Prussians and came to be a necessity for any modern country anticipating, or fearing, war. The Serbian officers of the Yugoslav General Staff, exemplified by men like Milutin Nedić were experienced and talented, but many were also suspicious of change and tended towards cliquish behavior.

Despite efforts made to integrate the other South Slav peoples into the kingdom, the officers’ corps of the Royal Yugoslav Armed Forces remained overwhelmingly Serbian, and those men guarded their position jealously. While previous service in the Austro-Hungarian military no longer disqualified eligible Croat and Slovene officers as it did in the first years of Yugoslavia’s existence, there was still a lingering legacy of distrust between the Serbs and the other peoples of the kingdom. Relations between ranks were often more cordial than those within the upper echelons of the military, however, as many officers held to the egalitarianism of the Royal Serb Army and were even willing to shake hands with their subordinates.

While keeping all of its shortcomings in mind, the Royal Yugoslav Army still had the advantages of a proud military tradition and high standards of discipline and training for its underequipped men. While the upper echelons of the officer staff were more conservative in their outlook, there were hopes that the new generation of officers would be more reform-minded and would help shape the army into one worthy of the Yugoslav nation.

Surrounded by hostile countries, many Yugoslav military planners sought to protect all of the gains of the World War by dispersing troops across the kingdom’s vast frontiers. The dispersal of forces complicated issues of supply and reduced the army’s ability to challenge the Ustaše and IMRO terrorist organizations.

At the start of 1936, the Royal Yugoslav Army was under the command of Field Marshal Milutin Nedić, whose service as a military attaché abroad gave him a clear picture of the deficiencies of his country’s army. His primary ideas of reform, however, were largely limited to rearming and upgrading the equipment of the kingdom’s soldiers rather than rethinking the tactics and strategies that were employed during the World War, particularly with regards to air power. Under Nedić’s direction, the army was split into several groups to try and protect all of Yugoslavia’s borders from invasion. Belgrade hosted the headquarters of the First Army, under the command of General Petar Kosic, who was responsible for defending Hungarian border in addition to his responsibilities as military commander of Belgrade. In the west and along the coast, General Josef Depre guards against any Italian incursions and Croatian separatism with the Second Army. Lastly, in the east, General Vladimir Cukavac headed the Third Army and was responsible for protecting Macedonia from Bulgarian attacks, both overt and those funneled through the IMRO.

The Royal Yugoslav Air Force

The Avia BH-33 was one of the foreign fighters that Yugoslavia purchased from abroad for her air force. Like the vz. 24 rifle, it was also of Czech design.

Despite being an appendage of the well-funded army, the Royal Yugoslav Air Force in 1936 was a far cry from the British Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe, in both terms of size and equipment. Lacking much in the way of a domestic aviation industry, the Yugoslav military had to content itself during much of the interwar period with purchasing the castoffs of its more advanced French and Czech allies. The shortage of airplanes, parts, and knowhow limited the amount of training flights conducted by the fledgling air force, leading to a corresponding lack in experienced pilots, adequate facilities, and doctrine. How the army would utilize its supply of airplanes in any of the potential conflicts facing Yugoslavia was a question that had not been answered by the general staff to any degree of satisfaction by the start of 1936. The planes and pilots of the Royal Yugoslav Air Force were dispersed across the different fronts in as haphazard a fashion as the army, and threatened to be a nonfactor in the event of war against a prepared opponent.

The Royal Yugoslav Navy

At the time of the kingdom’s unification, much of Yugoslavia’s naval experience came from Croats and Slovenes who had served in the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a fact which did not endear them, or the branch, to the kingdom’s Serb- and army-dominated military leadership.

In contrast to the other branches of the Kingdom’s military, the Royal Yugoslav Navy’s upper ranks was not made up of Serb officers but rather by Croat and Slovenes with naval experience dating back to service in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an understandable outcome as Serbia was a landlocked country before the formation of Yugoslavia and the initial ships of the navy were Austro-Hungarian vessels seized after the war. Out of every branch of the Royal Armed Forces, the navy is the most Yugoslav in character, but, ironically, this embrace of the state ideology of Yugoslavism led to dissension between it and the Serb-dominated army and its air wing, and to a mixed relationship with Belgrade.

During the 1920’s rumors abounded of lingering allegiance within the navy to the deposed Hapsburgs, but the Croat and Slovene officers held their ground and firmly resisted efforts to push more Serbs into the navy and its leadership. Since the failure of that intrigue, Serb chauvinists have found another way to strike out at the navy: with the deteriorating economic situation since the Great Depression leading to shrinking military budgets, the royal navy has consistently found itself drawing the short straw in allocations. For example, a planned naval air arm was discussed, but never made it past the initial discussion stages.

By 1936, the unofficial doctrine of the general staff was to make only a token effort at contesting the Adriatic in the event of a war with Italy. It was hoped that coastal defense by the army would be sufficient to make up for the dismal state of the navy. As much as the admiralty, under the leadership of the long-suffering Admiral Marijan Polic, hated to admit it, their rivals in the army had a point, as the outdated and undersized fleet under their command could not do much more than serve as a sacrificial lamb in the event of war with any other Mediterranean power. A multi-year-long program of expansion and modernization of equipment and doctrine would have to be undertaken before Yugoslavia could adequately protect her long coastline and project power into the Adriatic, much less the Mediterranean. With the looming threats on land and a limited amount of time to deal with them, the Serb-dominated government and military looked set to continue to stymie the royal navy.

Foreign Relations

The redrawing of European borders following the end of the World War was challenging and left few satisfied. The complicated state of Transylvania’s linguistic divisions provides a glimpse into the challenges faced by the victors who sought to reward allies, punish enemies, and follow some semblance of the policy of “self-determination”.

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was created at the expense of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the blurred ethnic boundaries of the Hapsburg realm still caused conflict in 1936, nearly two decades after its collapse. Yugoslavia was the subject of claims by the neighboring countries of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania, although some were more aggressive than others in pushing for territorial revisions.

The chief threat to Yugoslavia’s integrity in the 1930’s was the Kingdom of Italy with its bombastic Duce, Benito Mussolini. Although Italy was an ally of Serbia’s during the World War, the Fascist government in Rome promoted aims such as expanding Italy’s “living space”, dominating the Mediterranean Sea, and recapturing the glory of the Roman Empire, with Yugoslavia to play the unfortunate victim in many of the scenarios dreamed up in Rome. Tensions over the former Austrian littoral and Dalmatia due to conflicting claims in the public deliberations at Versailles and the secret negotiations that brought Italy into the war on the Entente side led to an Italian enclave in Zara and control of the Slovene-populated Istria. Mussolini’s regime made little secret of its desire to see Yugoslavia break-up, and supported Croatian separatists and successfully plotted the assassination of King Alexander to fulfill its aims.

In the face of Italian provocations, King Alexander and, later Prince Paul, instinctually groped for an accord with another war-time ally, France. But while Paris had done much at Versailles to advocate for Yugoslavia and other middle powers in Central Europe, relations had cooled over the course of the 1920's as France neglected its security arrangements in the East in order to win British support in the event of another war. Prince Paul, with his English education and ties with the royal family, was open to the possibilities of renewing the Entente Cordiale from the Great War, but the government in London refused to enter into any “Eastern commitments” and Paris preferred to court Mussolini as a partner against German aggression in the Stresa Front (although this tactic seemed to have suffered a fatal setback over the Italian invasion of Abyssinia).

The so-called “Little Entente” between Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia was one of many efforts made to sustain the fragile European order constructed at Versailles.

Yugoslavia was not without allies, however. As a member of the “Little Entente” with Czechoslovakia, and Romania, the kingdom was able to prevent the restoration of the former Habsburg emperor, Charles, to retake the Hungarian throne in 1921. The alliance deterred Hungarian revanchism, as it was designed to do, but efforts to broaden the scope of the Little Entente’s mission were harmed by the differing security situations of its members. While agreed on the need to contain Hungary, each member of the Little Entente perceived a different Great Power to be its primary threat, with Prague worrying about German ambitions in the Sudetenland, Bucharest about the Soviet Union invading Bessarabia, and Belgrade fearing Italian designs on the Adriatic coast. As Czechoslovakia developed closer ties to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Romania drifted into the German sphere, first economically, and then diplomatically as well.

The second formal alliance which Yugoslaiva was a part of was the Balkan Pact consisting of the kingdom, Romania, Greece, and Turkey. Just as the Little Entente was designed to stifle Hungarian aggression, the Balkan Pact was formed out of countries with an interest in preventing Bulgaria from reclaiming any of the territories lost during the World War or the Balkan Wars which had preceded it. While unable to point to any clear victories, as was the case with halting a Hapsburg restoration, there was a greater deal of accord between the members of the Balkan Pact over the need to maintain the status quo in Southeastern Europe.

With its National Socialist government, the German people seemed to discover a sense of unity and purpose that even the most ardent Yugoslavist could only dream of for his own country.

Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, the strengthening of Yugoslavia’s ties with Germany earned her no shortage of grief from her one-time allies, but this did little to slow the process. Even after tottering Weimar Republic was replaced by the German Reich, the two countries continued to grow closer. In the three years since Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists had taken power, the loser of the World War and the pariah of Europe had enjoyed a miraculous recovery of its economy and national pride. While many prominent Yugoslavs decried the loss of political freedoms under the new government, they still admitted that there was nonetheless much to be learned from Germany and its Führer. Aside from the economic revival that Germany experienced, and whose fruits it was eager to share in exchange for Yugoslav foodstuffs and minerals, many in Yugoslavia, including Prime Minister Stojadinović, were awed by the unifying force that Pan-German ideology held in the new Germany. While the divisions within Germany were not so severe as those within Yugoslavia, National Socialism’s attempts at reconciling laborer and capitalist, Catholic and Protestant, and the different German identities inspired nascent imitators in Yugoslavia who sought to revitalize and fulfill the ideals of Yugoslavism.

Of course, aligning with Germany was sure to invite trouble as Germany seemed to be on a collision course with the Western democracies. While Prince Paul conceded the need for continuing economic dependence on Germany for the foreseeable future, he also made sure to engender sympathy for Yugoslavia in London and Paris through both official and unofficial channels, sometimes butting heads with Stojadinović in his role of Foreign Minister in the process. In attempting to please all parties, however, it increasingly appeared as though Belgrade would endear Yugoslavia to none. The first major challenge to this policy of nonalignment came early in 1936, with the remilitarization of the Rhineland.

 

[Bullfilter]

The once proud army that had liberated Serbia from occupation by the Central Powers in the Great War had been the victim of budget cuts, political drama, and the ethnic conflict that seemed to permeate every aspect of the kingdom.

A microcosm indeed of the national dilemma.

It was unable to field enough divisions to defend all of the Kingdom’s threatened frontiers

And it is of course a very long and contested land frontier, with a large amount of actively or potentially hostile neighbours. Even a fully effective and actually united Yugoslavia would be hard pressed to defend them, let alone from possible German intervention later.

The overwhelmingly Serb nature of the Royal Yugoslav Army hindered its ability to earn the trust of the kingdom’s other constituencies and to operate in Croatian or Macedonian regions of the country.

Again, it mirrors the national divisions, doesn’t it.

Under Nedić’s direction, the army was split into several groups to try and protect all of Yugoslavia’s borders from invasion.

You can understand why, but the only strategic solution would be diplomatic - trying to reduce the number of adversaries to a manageable amount, plus some judicious military reform and expansion. It can’t all be defended, at once.

A multi-year-long program of expansion and modernization of equipment and doctrine would have to be undertaken before Yugoslavia could adequately protect her long coastline

And then you have the maritime border, so vulnerable to Italian naval and air power. Ouch.

Yugoslavia was the subject of claims by the neighboring countries of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania

Which will make the diplomatic game very tough.

While Prince Paul conceded the need for continuing economic dependence on Germany for the foreseeable future, he also made sure to engender sympathy for Yugoslavia in London and Paris through both official and unofficial channels

Making the great power relationships as fraught as the ones with immediate neighbours.

In attempting to please all parties, however, it increasingly appeared as though Belgrade would endear Yugoslavia to none. The first major challenge to this policy of nonalignment came early in 1936, with the remilitarization of the Rhineland.

Quite. No choice is both palatable and safe. This will be an interesting tightrope walk and one very likely to end in a fall - sooner or later.

 

[HIMDogson]

This looks very promising. I really like how detailed the narrative is.

 

[Captured Joe]

In the west and along the coast, General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović guards against any Italian incursions and Croatian separatism with the Second Army.

I guess he got promoted quicker than historically...?

 

[The Living Hive]

You can understand why, but the only strategic solution would be diplomatic - trying to reduce the number of adversaries to a manageable amount, plus some judicious military reform and expansion. It can’t all be defended, at once.

As we will see in the upcoming chapter and in future updates, there is contention within Yugoslavia over whether targeted diplomacy or a self-sufficient military is the answer to the kingdom's security dilemma. Ideally, these would be complimentary policies, but personality clashes and politics will be a challenge to be overcome. The Little Entente's meeting in March will certainly be an interesting one.

This looks very promising. I really like how detailed the narrative is.

Thank you for the high praise! I hope that you will enjoy what comes next.

I guess he got promoted quicker than historically...?

Good catch! I must have gotten my notes screwed up somewhere along the way... He has been replaced in the text with Josef Depre, who is actually in the game.

Next chapter is being polished up, and will be posted soon.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Three: Initial Disturbances (January 1st, 1936 to March 11th, 1936)

Economic Matters

Foreign capital and technical assistance continued to aid in the development of the Yugoslav economy, but many of the sites of new factories were determined by political factors rather than economic considerations. Areas with a high degree of separatist tendencies, or which were the objects of foreign ambitions tended to be neglected.

The start of 1936 saw increased efforts by Belgrade to modernize and diversify the Yugoslav economy. Using funds earned from agricultural and mineral exports, Belgrade was able to finance the construction of several modern factories which would produce light consumer goods for domestic consumption. The factories were designed to use modern methods and equipment and were thus operated in partnership with private German firms, with Berlin’s full approval. It was hoped that the lessons learned in these joint endeavors would be applied to heavier industrial processes in the future.

The kingdom’s industry was still gravely underdeveloped in 1936. Until Yugoslav efforts to close gaps in vital fields such as military equipment bore fruit, the deficit had to be made up with foreign partners, which provided another avenue for diplomatic maneuvers.

While Prince Paul was willing to accept continued economic reliance on Germany, he was more vocal in his opposition to Prime Minister Stojadinović’s plans for a similar partnership with an Italian shipbuilding firm to help expand the Yugoslav merchant marine. In his diary, Paul recorded being subjected to a long, patronizing lecture by Stojadinović on the need for foreign assistance to modernize and expand the kingdom’s dockyards, the pitiful state of the royal navy, and the resulting need to maintain friendly relations with Rome. The meeting ended with the prince’s grudging acquiescence of the move, but such an audience were becoming increasingly characteristic of the conceited prime minister.

Military Matters

Since its inception, politicians and military men had enjoyed a tense relationship. The reorganization and consolidation of the Royal Yugoslav Army may have been a necessary measure towards the eventual modernization of the kingdom’s armed forces, but it was met with dark murmurings among the generals.

Aside from his fraught relationship with the regent, Stojadinović was also eroding his base of support within the kingdom’s military by meddling in the affairs of the Yugoslav army. Although he cited the same shortages of equipment and manpower to secure the country’s borders that the generals had been complaining about for years, Stojadinović horrified many among their ranks with his proposed solutions. The country’s equipment shortage would be rectified, he announced to a closed session of the royal cabinet, by temporarily reducing the size of the army from twenty-two divisions to sixteen. Cavalry units would be redeployed to internal policing duties and the “frivolous” experimental tank brigade would be shuttered. As intended, the men and material freed up by this organization helped rebuild some of the army’s understrength divisions, although Stojadinović greatly exaggerated the positive effects of his reforms.

As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Milan Stojadinović was master of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy, but his policy of replacing “divisions with diplomats” was met with some skepticism both inside and outside of the kingdom.

However, the senior military staff seemed to exaggerate their negative effects as well. By their telling, Yugoslavia’s enemies would pounce upon the kingdom in this moment of weakness. In the face of these fears, Stojadinović asserted that his diplomatic efforts would prove more than capable of making up the deficit in arms. The general staff were doubtful of this claim, but, for the time being at least, they seemed content with grumbling about meddlesome politicians.

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War

The idealistic mission of the League of Nations was often in conflict with the perceived national interests of its most powerful and influential members.

In Belgrade, as in London and some corners in Paris, it was hoped that Mussolini’s war in Africa would be a long, drawn-out affair which would take years and bleed Italy dry, leading to the overthrow of the Fascist regime. Despite the now-popularized image of the modernized Italian forces riding roughshod over backwards African warriors armed with spears, the Ethiopians possessed a great deal of modern weaponry supplied by Europe, and it was believed that the charismatic Emperor Haile Selassie would be able to rally his people to a vigorous defense of their homeland. However, by early 1936 Second Italo-Ethiopia War was already looking very different from the conflict which took place forty years earlier.

By March of 1936, Italian forces were rapidly gaining ground against the faltering Ethiopian military.

The siege of Gondar was emblematic of the rapid progress that the Italians were making. The same politicians and generals who had been so certain of Mussolini’s folly were now worrying about the Duce’s next moves as the Ethiopian army began to buckle.

In Yugoslavia, the Italian advance into the heart of Ethiopia and the failure of the League of Nations to halt its advance gave a new impetus to Stojadinović’s diplomatic efforts. In addition to an envoy sent to Bulgaria, the foreign ministry began talks with the Italian ambassador to arrange for a bilateral treaty of friendship between Yugoslavia and Italy.

The proposed Hoare-Laval Pact between France, Britain, and Italy was seen by detractors as an immoral act of rewarding military aggression and of abandoning smaller countries to the larger ones. Its supporters held that it would have been a vital keystone in preserving the European peace and thwarting German ambitions.

In France, the war in Africa threatened to turn out the center-right government of Prime Minister Pierre Laval. Although the government had acquiesced to the League of Nation’s sanction regime against Italy, the Popular Front of left-leaning parties, including socialists and outright Communists, hammered on Laval’s pivotal role in the leaked Hoare-Laval Pact of the previous December, in which Britain and France offered to mediate an end to the Italo-Ethiopian War by granting territorial concessions to Italy at Ethiopia’s expense. Leon Blum, the Popular Front’s leader, argued that the proposed agreement had been the lowest kind of moral cowardice and craven realpolitik. Directing his ire against Laval personally, Blum fumed, “Not sensitive enough to the importance of great moral issues, you have reduced everything to the level of your petty methods.”

In a move that surprised both the supporters and the opponents of the government, Laval took to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies and gave an impassioned defense of his policy. In the wake of Italy’s rapid progress in Ethiopia, he was able to argue, with some measure of success, that the Anglo-French pact would have preserved some of Ethiopia rather than damning it to conquest as the moralizers living in a fantasy world would have it. He also made explicit the hopes of the Stresa Front, that Italy could be brought in as a partner in the maintenance of the European peace rather than serving as one of its fiercest foes. Members of the opposition, Laval asserted, were weakening France’s security at a time when she was in most need of allies against a resurgent Germany.

French Prime Minister Pierre Laval was a consummate survivor in the rough and tumble world of French politics. Given the unsteady nature of French politics, with twelve different cabinets formed in just five years, his contemporaries believed that the issue of the Hoare-Laval Pact would end his second term as Prime Minister.

When the votes came in, Laval’s government had survived by a narrow margin. The prime minister and his supporters had successfully made the issue at hand one of patriotism and French security rather than the morality of diplomatic agreements. Enlisting some of the deputies who had crossed the aisle to support the government, and excluding those who had turned against him, Laval announced the revival of Georges Clemenceau’s "National Bloc" of French patriots. Although nominally an heir to the union sacrée of the Great War, the new government was, in effect, another coalition of right-leaning parties, albeit with a stronger emphasis on French patriotism and security than on economic matters.

The new French government quickly earned itself a round of perfunctory denunciations in Berlin and Moscow, but in other countries, Belgrade in particular, it was hoped that Laval’s strengthened position would mean that Paris would be more steadfast in upholding its security commitments to countries in Eastern and Central Europe. This support would be needed more than ever as the defeated powers of the last war moved to prepare for the next conflict.

Rumors Out of Budapest

Despite efforts to keep Hungarian violations of provisions of the Treaty of Trianon secret, some in Budapest believed that Hungary could follow in Berlin’s footsteps and extract concessions through a mixture of boldness and guile.

Worrying news was leaking out of Hungarian embassies around Europe, as it appeared that Budapest was making surreptitious moves towards rearmament, in direct violation of the Treaty of Trianon, such as approaching foreign governments regarding purchases of arms and enlarging the size of its armed forces. It would emerge later that these leaks were, in-part, exaggerated as part of an attempt by Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy, to renegotiate key provisos of Trianon, but at the time the rumors had the effect of sparking fear in the capitals of the member states of the Little Entente. The Czech, Romanian, and Yugoslav governments agreed to a conference in March to discuss Hungarian rearmament and to settle on a united course of action. Ultimately, events elsewhere in Europe would overshadow this issue and the blow it dealt to the European peace.

The Remilitarization of the Rhineland

“Neither threats nor warnings will prevent me from going my way. I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker.” – Adolf Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag announcing the remilitarization of the Rhineland.

On the morning of March 11th, 1936, German troops entered the Rhineland. Although it was German territory (despite the abortive effort by France to secure its secession), the Rhineland had remained demilitarized since the Treaty of Versailles as a sop to French security. At the time, the ability of the French army to rapidly move into German territory through the Rhineland was held to be a key factor in dissuading Germany from going to war. Combined with a series of alliances between French and countries in Eastern Europe, any move by Germany to revise the post-war order was to be met with overwhelming force.

As French military doctrine evolved, however, the idea of a quick thrust into Germany became overshadowed by the Maginot Line of fortifications along the Franco-German border. In contrast with the offensive, and optimistic, spirit which had guided French military planning before the outbreak of the Great War, French military planners had embraced a more resigned view that any war between France and Germany would be a war of attrition similar to the trench warfare that had characterized much of the fighting on the Western Front. To that end, the loss of Rhineland’s demilitarized status was taken to be unfortunate, but not so catastrophic to France’s strategic situation as to necessitate war. The ongoing efforts to entice London and Rome into a formal anti-German alliance also led Paris to issue a response to the move that was more diplomatic than military in character.

While French generals believed that their country’s security was still well-secured by border fortifications, this sentiment was not shared by France’s allies in the East. Their patron’s failure to meet the German challenge to Versailles seemed to point to a lack of will on Paris’s part, and the loss of the Rhineland’s vulnerable status appeared to demonstrate a change in French policy towards the east. Since the signing of the Locarno Treaties in 1925, one of the greatest fears among Poland and the powers of the Little Entente was that the western democracies would sign away the territory of these newly independent countries in order to preserve their own security. The French strategy of an aggressive drive into the Rhineland worked to counteract this anxiety, but with the loss of the Rhineland’s vulnerable status, soon to be compounded by a German fortification program, it was not clear what aid, if any, France would offer to her allies in the East.

It was under this shadow that the leaders of the Little Entente met in Bucharest to discuss the future of their alliance.

 

[Bullfilter]

While French generals believed that their country’s security was still well-secured by border fortifications, this sentiment was not shared by France’s allies in the East. Their patron’s failure to meet the German challenge to Versailles seemed to point to a lack of will on Paris’s part, and the loss of the Rhineland’s vulnerable status appeared to demonstrate a change in French policy towards the east.

They are right to be concerned, of course.

it was not clear what aid, if any, France would offer to her allies in the East.

All help short of actual assistance, one suspects.

 

[RustyHunter]

An excellent beginning! Yugoslavia is surrounded by vultures, but both the Axis and Allies are interested in courting her. I'm excited to see where the game takes you.

 

[Cromwell]

A great many problems to be solved but a thorough and honest accounting of what is wrong is always the best foundation to any lasting sololution. It's time for Yugoslavians to stand together!

 

[The Living Hive]

They are right to be concerned, of course.

All help short of actual assistance, one suspects.

I'm not sure what the percentage likelihood of the French AI strengthening the Little Entente alliance, but I'm guessing it ain't great. Must be nice to have a line of air conditioned fortifications instead of open plains and an undefended coastline.

An excellent beginning! Yugoslavia is surrounded by vultures, but both the Axis and Allies are interested in courting her. I'm excited to see where the game takes you.

Thank you, I hope that you will enjoy the ride! We'll see if Yugoslavia's statesmen can keep the love triangle going or if it will turn into a hate rhombus.

A great many problems to be solved but a thorough and honest accounting of what is wrong is always the best foundation to any lasting sololution. It's time for Yugoslavians to stand together!

An admirable sentiment! Prince Paul wholeheartedly approves! Now if only we could have some more Yugoslavians in addition to all of the Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians that we have instead...

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Four: Le Virage à Droite (March 7th, 1936 to April 26th, 1936)

A Meeting in Bucharest

Although a temperamental and self-aggrandizing man, King Carol of Romania still saw himself as the protector of Romanians, and he took the steps that he thought necessary to secure his kingdom from internal and external dangers.

While Prime Minister Stojadinović was preoccupied with his own diplomatic efforts in Rome, it fell to Prince Paul to head Yugoslavia’s delegation to the Little Entente conference in Bucharest. Over the last few months, King Carol had reinforced his rule over Romania with a series of decrees that made it clear that the king, not the prime minister, held the whip hand in the country. While such moves towards consolidating power in the hands of dilettantish Carol were viewed with some concern in Belgrade and Prague, such internal matters were held to be outside of the purview of the Little Entente alliance, especially in the face of bold actions from Germany and Hungary. In his diary, however, Paul took note of his fellow royal’s successes and his failures. The proposed “Sentinels of the Motherland” program that Carol had tasked some of his entourage with developing for Romania’s youth attracted no small amount of the regent’s ink.

The conference itself was a mixed bag as none of the countries present walked away feeling as though their security needs had been met. A joint statement issued by the heads of state of the Little Entente to other countries attempted to present a united front against the revision of the post-war order, but the document was most notable for its omissions. While the members of the alliance were quick to denounce Hungarian rearmament and scheming for a restoration of Hungary’s pre-Trianon borders, no mention was made of Germany despite the remilitarization of the Rhineland scant weeks earlier. In this, it appeared as though the Romanian and Yugoslav delegations had been successful in removing any language that might antagonize their German trade partners. In exchange, however, there was also no mention made in the statement about the threat of international Communism and its base of operations, the Soviet Union. Czech efforts to negotiate an alliance with the Soviet Union, over German, Polish, and Romanian objections, were not to be jeopardized by any rhetoric issued in conjunction with Prague’s allies.

A map of the area of Teschen, contested by Poland and Czechoslovakia and subject to a plebiscite in 1920. The imperfect borders drawn after the Great War were resented not only by the conflict’s losers, but by some of its winners as well, and hindered efforts at cooperation among newly created or empowered countries.

When it came to the matter of Hungarian revisionism, the Little Entente’s joint statement and the accompanying promises of staff exchanges and joint exercises was a firm answer to Budapest’s intrigues, but behind the scenes there had been little else that the three countries could find common ground on. Attempts to address the trade deficits between the industrialized Czechoslovakia and the more agricultural Yugoslavia and Romania went nowhere, and neither did efforts expand the alliance’s military convention to address threats to peace arising outside of the former Hapsburg realm. A proposal made in passing by Carol to offer membership in the Little Entente to Poland led to many wasted hours as Prague’s delegation painstakingly relitigated the border disputes between Poland and their own country.

Disappointment over the squabbling between supposed allies darkened Prince Paul’s mood considerably and he was not overly reluctant to hand the reins of foreign policy back over to Stojadinović and his schemes. Before the conference in Bucharest, there had been talk of organizing a similar meeting between the members of the Balkan Pact alliance consisting of Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, and Turkey, but the sour experience with the Little Entente led Carol to shelve the idea. Few tears were shed in Belgrade, as Stojadinović had his own plans for dealing with Bulgaria.

The Crackdown on Communism

The sudden rightward shift in French politics was unexpected, and sparked a cycle of violence and upheaval as the new government and supporters of the Popular Front turned Paris into a combat zone.

While the Czech government was making nice with Moscow, others in Europe were moving to suppress the Soviet-directed Communist movements in their own countries. In the aftermath of the failure of the Popular Front’s attempt at throwing out the right-leaning government of Pierre Laval, Communists and their Socialist sympathizers went on strike and rioted in Paris and in other major French cities. Citing the “disruptive and divisive actions of an entity under the control of a foreign power”, the new National Bloc moved to ban the Communist Party of France. The crackdown was not dissimilar to the one employed two years earlier, with the Popular Front’s vocal support, against the various monarchist and far-right leagues. This move against the Communists was seen by some supporters of the government as a kind of second Thermidorian Reaction which would restore some semblance of order and continuity to the upheaval of French politics. To Laval’s critics, it was a dictatorial move straight out of the playbook of the Italian Fascists or the German National Socialists.

While not as far-reaching an effort as that undertaken in Germany, Belgrade still sought to mimic the National Socialists’ program of reducing class tensions through improving the material and social conditions of Yugoslavia’s workers. It was hoped that success in state-owned factories would lead to adoption in private companies and with foreign-operated firms within the kingdom.

Waves of sympathetic strikes broke out in other European capitals with the encouragement of those nations’ Communist parties. The French workers were assured of the support of their comrades across the continent, but beyond rhetoric such support was wholly lackluster. In Bucharest, for example, King Carol portrayed the dozens of squabbling leftists as a threat to public order and increased his already substantial dictatorial powers. In Yugoslavia, the public move by the Communists made it easier for the government in Belgrade to identify their membership and to monitor them more closely. In contrast to the measures utilized in France and elsewhere, the strikes in Yugoslavia coincided with a major push to reform labor laws and to improve the conditions for workers in state-owned factories. While isolated incidents of confrontation and violence took place, sometimes involving members of Belgrade’s sizable diaspora of White Russians, the efforts at reform ameliorated the strikes in Yugoslavia while still allowing the agitators to claim that they had won some concessions for the kingdom’s proletariat. As the outlook for the country’s workers began to improve, Prime Minister Stojadinović was eagerly anticipating using the reforms for political capital. Before April was over, posters were being printed with the Radical Union’s logo and the slogan “Prosperity at Home and Peace on the Borders!”

The Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty

Denounced in some corners as a deal with the devil, normalizing ties between Yugoslavia and Italy was a key element in Milan Stojadinović’s diplomatic program. The ongoing Second Italo-Ethiopia War allowed him to extract an enviable amount of concessions from the Italian delegation.

With Italy’s relationships with the rest of Europe growing increasingly strained over the war with Ethiopia, Rome was more receptive than might have been expected to overtures from Yugoslavia and its wily prime minister. Milan Stojadinović had been working since the outbreak of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War to secure a conference between his country and Italy. Feelers sent out through intermediaries conveyed that Stojadinović and his government were not opposed to the alteration of European borders on principle, but rather on the basis of Yugoslav interests and security. Although Italian ambitions on Yugoslavia had long been a feature of Fascist rhetoric and policy, the failure of the Stresa Front with Britain and France left Rome casting about for diplomatic alternatives.

Mussolini’s negotiators, headed by his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, dusted off an article that the Duce had written in April of 1915 on the subject of Italo-Serbian relations and the Dalmatian coast and, with Mussolini’s approval, used an updated form of it as one of the starting points for negotiations. One of the key points that was revived was a pledge to respect Yugoslavia’s borders, including a renunciation of Italian claims to the whole of the Dalmatian coast which had been a sticking point in relations between the two countries since the war. In exchange, Italy received a limiting of the size of the Yugoslav navy, recognition of Albania as falling within an Italian sphere of influence, and promises to consult on matters of foreign policy which concerned both countries. This latter clause included Rome withdrawing its support for Bulgarian agitation regarding Yugoslav Macedonia.

For years, Ante Pavelić and other members of the paramilitary Ustaše organization had used Italy as a base for violently agitating for Croatian independence. The sudden reversal of Italian policy left them scrambling for a new source of arms, funds, and protection. Pavelić fled to Hungary to continue his activities only hours before Italian police arrived at his residence.

From this amicable beginning, conventions were also reached on expanding economic relations and sharing information on combatting groups such as Croatian or Communist terrorists who sought refuge in one country for crimes committed in the other. As a sign of goodwill, the Italian government provided the identities and place of residence for more than five-hundred Ustaše members, many of whom moved between the two kingdoms, and in the coming weeks would arrest a number of them on Italian soil. While the failure of Stojadinović and his team to secure an outright pact of non-aggression with Italy was a disappointment, the withdrawal of Italian support for the Ustaše meant that Belgrade’s efforts to stamp out the organization would be more successful.

While both sides believed that such an agreement could, and would, eventually be overturned by future developments, it provided valuable breathing room for Yugoslavia to industrialize and expand its army and for Italy to digest its newest colonial acquisition and to rebuild its international prestige. Some members of the Yugoslav high command, who had themselves been privately forlorn about the kingdom’s ability to fend off an Italian invasion and publicly dismissive of the Royal Yugoslav Navy, howled with indignation that Stojadinović had agreed to limits on Yugoslavia’s naval arm. Warnings about the disastrous nature of this policy were well-received by those already predisposed in favor of the military and against the prime minister, but since the army’s leadership had shown no interest in constructing new ships for years the denunciations rang more than a little hollow.

The rapid pace of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, and the mixed response to the war, heightened the unease felt in many countries, but also provided opportunities for those bold enough to seize them.

From the Yugoslav point of view, the treaty’s signing occurred at the most opportune time, as the final concessions had been extracted and the ink dried mere days before the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa was captured. However, while Stojadinović was eagerly trumpeting the agreement as a guarantee of the kingdom’s independence, it was hardly seen as such abroad. Both London and Rome felt that the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty of 1936 edged Yugoslavia closer to, if not outright inside, the Italian sphere. Winston Churchill, a Conservative member of parliament, warned darkly that Yugoslavia had “fallen into the camp of its fellow dictatorships”. Given the Suez Canal’s role as a lifeline to India, it was the opinion of Churchill and his allies that this enlargement of the Italian influence in the Mediterranean necessitated a response to preempt any attempt at challenging British predominance in the region.

Taking his cue from negotiations between Yugoslav allies and other countries without consulting Belgrade, Stojadinović negotiated the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship treaty without notifying, much less consulting, the French, Czech, or Romanian governments. Seeing itself abandoned by its chief patron, the Bulgarian government began making arrangements to open similar negotiations with Yugoslavia. For the time being at least, Stojadinović could claim a vindication of his foreign policy, but the seeds for future discord had been planted.

To his supporters, the defeated emperor of Ethiopia seemed a tragic figure on par with Cassandra. His grave intonation that, “It is us today, it will be you tomorrow”, had the ring of an Old Testament prophet’s warnings.

Besides that of Emperor Haile Selassie, who managed to flee abroad before his empire’s surrender, every politician, general, and newsman seemed to have his own opinion about the meaning of the Italian victory over Ethiopia. For some, it was a failure of the League of Nations, of the principle of collective security, or a policy of “appeasing” dictatorships. Others saw Mussolini’s feat as a triumph of blending mechanical advancements with national élan, or a victory for the “proletarian nations” that had been oppressed by the expansive colonial empires of other nations. In Italy itself, the war’s conclusion was both portrayed as a step towards Italy recapturing the glory of the past and as a victory for civilization and modernity. Immediate measures were taken to abolish the unsightly practice of slavery in Ethiopia, for example.

A New Industrial Program

Even as conditions were being improved for workers in Yugoslavia’s state-owned factories, efforts were underway to expand and rationalize their operation.

While one of Rome’s rationales for acquiring a colony in Ethiopia was to provide an outlet for the pent-up population of Italy, little attention was initially attracted to the newly proclaimed colony of Italian East Africa. While investments and settlement continued apace in the more developed region of Eritrea, a large number of Italian businesses saw the signing of the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty as an invitation, by both Belgrade and Rome, to do business in the neighboring kingdom. The influx of new capital and knowhow helped to reduce somewhat the Yugoslav economy’s dependence on German resources and goodwill, and would pioneer the development of new industries and methods of production. The loss of Italian investments to areas outside of the country and its colonial empire was an irritant for some in the National Fascist Party, but others in Rome contented themselves with the thought that further economic penetration would help to put Yugoslavia under Italian control steadily and peacefully.

Birth of Princess Elizabeth

Prince Paul holding the newborn princess. The royal family would be a constant source of relief for Paul during the eventful period of his rule of Yugoslavia.

Even as Europe was reeling from upheavals across the continent, the people of Yugoslavia and their regent had a moment of happiness with the birth of Princess Elizabeth on April 7th, 1936. Always a devoted father, Prince Paul helped his wife Princess Olga to welcome the child into the world and sought refuge from the burdens of rule in family life. Unfortunately, for Paul, his vacation would be cut short by another shocking international development, and the need for him to intervene in the fray of Yugoslav politics.

 

[Bullfilter]

A very convincing chapter on game events and difficult to tell where the blend of OTL and ATL occurs. Authoritatively written: and I’m intrigued to see how Yugoslavia navigates what will become a chaotic international situation. Will they try to avoid all conflict? Or pick a side early? Will the aim be to simply preserve national integrity and existence, or look to build a wider Pan-Slavic state?

 

[RustyHunter]

Another excellent update, and a lot has happened! You appear to have defused tensions with Italy in the short term, but I'm not sure how long that will last. It seems like a hard line to avoid becoming a puppet of either Axis or Allies. France would be more than happy for the Little Entente to fight their wars (and do the dying), while I'm sure the Italians have not totally given up on the coast.

 

[The Living Hive]

A very convincing chapter on game events and difficult to tell where the blend of OTL and ATL occurs. Authoritatively written: and I’m intrigued to see how Yugoslavia navigates what will become a chaotic international situation. Will they try to avoid all conflict? Or pick a side early? Will the aim be to simply preserve national integrity and existence, or look to build a wider Pan-Slavic state?

Thank you for the praise! I've been fortunate that the AI's behavior has given me some curveballs to work into the story and make it more interesting. This next chapter will see some tentative steps towards the future of the kingdom. Of course, the concept of Greater Yugoslavia has a good deal of appeal to pan-Slavists, but matters at home ought to be settled first before Belgrade attempts to acquire more subjects. Our first goal is survival, but the best way to achieve that may be through some prudent expansion...

Another excellent update, and a lot has happened! You appear to have defused tensions with Italy in the short term, but I'm not sure how long that will last. It seems like a hard line to avoid becoming a puppet of either Axis or Allies. France would be more than happy for the Little Entente to fight their wars (and do the dying), while I'm sure the Italians have not totally given up on the coast.

Outside of Spain, things seem to be fairly quiet for now, but given that this is a World War simulator, I doubt that will last for too long. As we'll see, everyone seems to be focusing on matters at home rather than try and attempt any bold moves abroad. I know that Italy has a national focus to befriend Yugoslavia instead of making claims on Croatia and Slovenia, but I don't think that I have ever seen the AI take it!

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Five: The Opening Salvo (April 26th, 1936 to September 2nd, 1936)

The Outbreak of the Spanish Civil War

With the civil war, Spain’s deep-seated social divides finally tore the country apart in open violence. Other countries looked warily at the bloodshed, or sought to profit from it.

Spain had been embroiled in turmoil since the Napoleonic Wars, with upheaval at home and losses at home sending the once-mighty country spiraling into irrelevance. The country’s neutrality during the World War spared it from the bloodshed visited upon the rest of Europe, but a brutal colonial war in Morocco and social unrest led to the overthrow of King Alfonso XIII in 1931 and the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. Many conservative Spaniards, including the clergy, the peasantry, and a sizable portion of the military was unreconciled with the new government. For its part, the Republican government in Madrid sought to break these bastions of reaction, for instance by passing laws against the Catholic Church. The two sides, each of which was made up of several competing groups, were caught in a cycle of escalation and violence became commonplace across Spain. Foreign observers were increasingly of the opinion that some sort of internal shakeup, whether a coup or outright armed conflict, was inevitable.

When the civil war came, it started with an attempted military coup d’etat in response to the April 1936 parliamentary elections. A group of high-ranking Spanish generals charged that widespread voter fraud, intimidation, and other illegal and coercive measures had led to the formation of an illegitimate government. Whether the military truly wished to merely serve as a caretaker government until new elections or the generals wanted to seize power outright, their attempt to seize control of the government was met with fierce resistance by Republican stalwarts. The coup failed to unseat the government in Madrid, and what followed was a long and drawn-out war between the two halves of Spanish society.

Drawn into the Republican coalition more by opposition to the Nationalists than out of any real affection for their allies, the Spanish anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica were tolerated to an extent by their cobelligerents, but their ideology and behavior on and off the battlefield earned them no small degree of enmity from the rest of the Republican coalition.

On one side was the various factions rallying under the Republican banner. While there was no small number of actual democrats in their ranks, the fiercest fighters, most passionate orators, and most public faces were found elsewhere. Spain had enjoyed, or suffered from, a sizable anarchist movement which threw its lot in with the Republic. Also filling the ranks of the government’s supporters were the Socialists and Communists whose experience as street fighters and affinity for Moscow made them a valuable and dangerous addition to the Republican coalition.

Francisco Franco, Generalissimo of the Nationalist forces and the faction’s provisional head of state, undertook the Herculean task of welding together the monarchists, syndicalists, and conservatives under his command into a unified front.

On the Nationalist side, a competing alliance had formed out of the aristocratic landowners, the monarchists who wished to install the Carlist pretender on the vacant Spanish throne, and the National Syndicalists of the Spanish Falange. Undergirded by a shared sense of Catholicism and anti-Communism, these different factions banded together under the leadership of Spain’s conservative generals to do battle for the soul of Spain. After the sudden death of General José Sanjurjo, one of the chief plotters of the attempted coup d’état, in an airplane accident, power shifted to another general, Francisco Franco. With his well-armed and well-trained Army of Africa, Franco contributed immensely to the Nationalist cause in the civil war’s early days and earned a reputation as one of the few men who could command the respect, and the obedience, of the squabbling factions making up the Nationalist forces.

The initial battlelines were drawn across the heart of Spain. While the Republicans controlled many of the major cities, they enjoyed less support in the countryside and the territory under Madrid’s control was cut in half as a result. While the Republicans enjoyed initial control over most of Spain’s industrial capital, the Nationalists could call on the services of the Spanish military, as the vast majority of its officers defected from the Republic in the war’s opening days. Fighting, reprisals, and counter-reprisals turned the country into a hellscape of craters and human cruelty as neighbor fought neighbor, and the world watched.

The International Response

Members of the German "Condor Legion" sent to assist the Nationalist forces. Among the revisionist powers, the Spanish Civil War had the lure of not only gaining a military, diplomatic, and ideological ally, but also of testing out tools and tactics for a new generation of warfare.

The outbreak of war in Spain soon became a microcosm of the antagonistic and dangerous state of Europe as a whole, in no small part due to the interference of different foreign powers. The conflict between the Nationalists and the Republicans seemed to be a more kinetic version of the same competition which had been playing out within and between European countries, even if the exact nature of that conflict was another source of debate. Accordingly, while groups of young men actually volunteering to fight for their preferred size trickled into Spain, foreign governments also supplied more direct, albeit clandestine, aid. The chief patrons of Francisco Franco and the Nationalists were Germany and Italy, while the Republicans had the outright support among the great powers of only the Soviet Union.

While all three governments professed neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, the actions taken in London, Paris, and Washington differed sharply. While the European parties prepared for what conflicts may come, the mood in the United States was still one of hope that entanglement in another European war could be avoided.

The official British response to the conflict was a mealy-mouthed one, lamenting the horrors inflicted by both sides on the Spanish people while refusing to take a steadfast position in favor of either party. The sole issue regarding the civil war that seemed to be able to rile Whitehall was that of noninterference. By seeking to limit the supply of men and material from other countries to Spain, Great Britain had turned indecision into a virtue. Although Paris went along with London’s plans for a nonintervention committee, French reluctance to get involved in Spain owed less to ideals and more to cynical debate over which side in the conflict would prove a better neighbor and whether the French leftists, still licking their wounds over the collapse of the Popular Front and planning a new wave of strikes, would see French intervention in Spain as an invitation to redouble their efforts.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States of America renewed the previous year’s Neutrality Act which forbade the selling of arms and other materials of war to warring nations one month after the outbreak of the civil war in Spain. The 1936 iteration of the law also expanded its scope to ban loans and extensions of credit to belligerents as well. Although President Franklin Roosevelt voiced concerns about the limits that the Neutrality Act imposed on the country’s ability to support friendly nations, the popularity of non-intervention and the presidential election in November led him to sign it into law. Some of the law’s critics actually argued that it did not go far enough, especially since it did not recognize competing sides in a civil war as being belligerents. Accordingly, the Nationalist and Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War were free to lobby sympathizers in America to send them weapons and trucks as well as volunteers to operate them.

The Soviet campaign against suspected saboteurs and foreign agents within the ruling Communist Party and the military became a symbol of the capricious and paranoid nature of Josef Stalin’s government, and, some critics contended, its incompetence.

The opening months of the war in Spain overlapped with the culmination of the series of purges initiated by Josef Stalin which had wreaked havoc on the Soviet military’s command structure. In the long term, the Communist Party’s control over the mighty armed forces of the country seemed assured, but in the short term the officer corps was decimated by suspicion and recriminations. While still a formidable force on paper, it was not clear how the Soviet military would operate in the aftermath of the purges. The war in Spain provided an opportunity for Moscow to not only expand its influence abroad but also to produce a new cadre of politically reliable officers to replace those which had been executed.

Heightening Tensions in the Balkans

The World War had its origins in Great Power competition and national ambitions in the Balkans. Without any power intending it, history seemed to be repeating itself.

While the larger states of Europe were continuing their own preparations for the coming conflagration, the smaller countries were also making their own preparations. Inspired by French strategy yet less confident in French reliability, Czechoslovakia spent much of 1936 improving and expanding the wall of fortifications on its borders. The bulk of attention and construction was focused on keeping the German-populated region of the Sudetenland secure from invasion by Germany proper, but some resources were also devoted to the “Hungarian line” of forts which aimed to prevent Prague’s southern neighbor from seeking to reestablish Hungarian rule over Slovakia.

Claiming to be acting in response to these moves, Horthy and his generals organized a series of war games to ensure that the Hungarian army would be in top condition in the event of hostilities. Rearmament was still hampered by provisions of the Treaty of Trianon and the accompanying inspectors, so the still-undermanned and underequipped Hungarian army did not inspire much fear on its own. The presence of Italian and German officers among those observing the maneuvers, however, heightened the significance of the maneuvers for Hungary’s neighbors. Further complicating matters in the Balkans was a new Bulgarian rearmament program. The losers of the last war appeared to be making preparations for the next one.

Whether it was out of a desire to keep his kingdom’s options open or for a genuine change in Romania’s international alignment, Carol spearheaded the signing of an extensive trade treaty with Germany. The treaty opened the country up to German investment, which quickly began to supplant native Romanian businesses, and also provided Berlin with a ready supply of oil to fuel the modernized war machines of the Wehrmacht. In an already tumultuous year, the treaty between Germany and Romania was merely the latest of the shocks delivered to the post-war order. When challenged on this unilateral move, Bucharest pointed to the signing of the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty as a precedent for member states of the Little Entente or Balkan Pact alliances to conduct diplomacy without consulting their allies. The reasoning was not unsound, but it exacerbated the already fraught relationships between Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

The All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain

The Spanish Civil War attracted not only foreign equipment and funding, but also foreign fighters who came to the country to fight on either the Nationalist or the Republican side of the conflict.

The ranks of both the Nationalist and the Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War were bolstered by foreign volunteers. Dedicated Catholics and fervent “anti-Fascists” flocked to Iberia to advance their righteous causes. In Yugoslavia, a group of Croatian officers attempted to resign their commissions in order to fight in Spain. Some members of the government were horrified at what they viewed as a shirking of duty in order to fight in a foreign conflict. The predominantly Croatian element in those seeking to go to Spain, including enlisted men who were following in the footsteps of their officers, seemed to threaten the growth of an independent sense of Croatian identity within the military when Yugoslavia could ill afford it. Furthermore, such men might be exposed to radical ideologies like those of the Spanish Falangists and become a source of well-trained recruits to the paramilitary Ustaše.

However, if these concerned officials were expecting a crackdown, they were sorely disappointed. Instead of asking the military to block the officers from leaving and to punish them, Prince Paul and Prime Minister Stojadinović produced a compromise. The Croatian officers would be allowed to Spain, but under the guise of an All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain. The men leaving for Spain would retain their rank but suffer a freeze in pay and would perform their duties under the leadership of General Milan Nedić, a member of the General Staff and cousin to Field Marshal Milutin Nedić.

The All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain had a lofty title and, publicly, an admirable mission, but its real purposes were initially known only to its members and the men in Belgrade who approved its formation.

Officially, the hastily assembled mission’s purpose was to provide humanitarian relief for Spanish civilians caught between the warring sides, but its true character was that of a military delegation sent to Spain to establish contacts with the provisional government and military leadership of the Nationalists. The Yugoslav military was placated with the idea that the Relief Mission would allow Yugoslavia to observe firsthand the latest advances in warfare, and do so under the watchful eye of a trusted Serb officer. Stojadinović believed that valuable political contacts could be established between Yugoslavia and Spain to improve the kingdom’s position in European politics. Prince Paul hoped that the Croatians sent to Spain would be grateful to Belgrade for letting them assist their brothers in the faith and that they would serve as the nucleus of a new generation of Croatian leaders who were loyal to the Yugoslav nation.

The Balancing Act of Foreign Investment

“For every step we take towards Berlin and Rome, we must match it with one towards London and Paris. Such is the dance that we perform for the sake of peace.” – Prince Paul

The Spanish Civil War was the latest in a series of international upheavals which threatened to sort European nations into rival blocs. With French undergoing internal unrest and the Stresa Front seemingly abandoned, it fell to the reluctant British to champion the interests of the status quo against those powers seeking to change it. The signing of the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty compounded the perception that had already existed in Western capitals that Yugoslavia was becoming a member of the revisionist camp. The kingdom’s economic dependence on Berlin had long been an excuse for Belgrade to keep the peace, but the pursuit of additional commercial ties with Mussolini’s Italy seemed to be a matter not of necessity but of preference, especially coming as it did in the waning days of the conquest of Ethiopia.

With the danger of war with Italy and Hungary seemingly tempered by the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty and the Little Entente alliance respectively, Belgrade’s industrial planners began to look outside of Serbia and lay the groundwork for new factories to be constructed in Slovenia and Croatia.

From a purely economic standpoint, by the second half of 1936, German and Italian help had already delivered sizable benefits to the Yugoslav economy. Foreign investment and techniques fueled the development of Belgrade’s industrial plan and appetites for the kingdom’s exports only grew with the cooling of ties between the British and French empires on one hand and Germany and Italy on the other. As long as Yugoslavia could remain on friendly terms with all four countries, she could enjoy a healthy profit. However, such a position was becoming increasingly untenable due to the hardening of attitudes in foreign capitals and Yugoslavia’s apparent leanings towards the revisionist powers.

While Dr. Ivo Andrić appealed to the brains of his British audience, the charming Yugoslav businessman in his delegation, Duško Popov, appealed to their sensibilities, and their pocketbooks.

To counteract the perception of Yugoslavia as a satellite of Germany or Italy, Prince Paul met with the British envoy in Yugoslavia, Ronald H. Campbell and asked the foreign ministry to assemble a team which would approach Great Britain with an olive branch of favorable terms and incentives for British investment in Yugoslavia. With Stojadinović busy organizing the Relief Mission, it fell to Dr. Ivo Andrić, an acclaimed author and head of the Ministry of Foreign Affair’s political department, to lead the negotiating team to London. While the British government was staunchly opposed to state investment in the kingdom, it grudgingly agreed to publicize the offer among the country’s leading lights of industry and finance. Dr. Andrić’s counterparts also seemed to accept his explanations that Yugoslavia’s economic policy was in no way an inditement of her commitment to peace and stability in Europe. For the time being, at least, it appeared as though the balancing act would continue for a while longer.

The 1936 Olympic Games

At the Olympic games, guns and planes were replaced with muscles and sweat, but the conflict and competition between nations remained.

After many months of tension and intrigue, the Olympic games in Berlin promised to be the highlight of the summer. With politicking inevitable at such an occasion, the host nation’s demonstrations of Germany’s rebirth under National Socialism were accepted by most with polite interest. For a few days, in the excitement of the competition, it was almost possible to forget the uneasy situation Europe found itself in. The absence of any Spanish athletes owing to the country’s civil war, however, was a constant reminder of the truth.

For Yugoslavia, the Olympic games was a chance to present the best side of the country to the world and to provide the kingdom’s citizens with a powerful symbol of unity. After the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles saw just one Yugoslav athlete travel to the United States to compete in the discus throw owing to the Great Depression, Belgrade was eager to provide its citizens with a team of Olympians of which they could be proud. To that end, a multiethnic team of over ninety athletes, over three times as many as the number which the kingdom had sent to the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, had been assembled. Counting both fresh faces and seasoned veterans among their ranks, the Yugoslav government was cautiously optimistic about their ability to make a healthy, if not outstanding, showing in the games.

Leon Štukelj, a Yugoslav gymnast of Slovene ethnicity, was the sole source of national pride, and national propaganda, for the kingdom at the 1936 Olympics.

Ultimately, despite the size of the team and the hopes pinned on the multi-ethnic assemblage of athletes by their government, Yugoslavia’s participation in the Olympics was not overly impressive. While the German teams swept across the medal table like lightning, between them Yugoslav athletes had earned only one medal by the end of the games: a silver in the rings event. Nonetheless, the athlete who won the medal, long-time Olympian Leon Štukelj was celebrated by Belgrade as a shining example of the Yugoslav people. The gymnast’s Slovene ethnicity was emphasized by state media only as much as it could highlight how Štukelj had transcended such a narrow concept and had become an avatar of all the Yugoslav people. For his part, Štukelj embraced his role as a symbol for the entire Yugoslav nation and spent the next few months embarking on a series of lectures and demonstrations across the kingdom to emphasize the importance of physical fitness for individual health and as a way to create common ties of brotherhood between the various Yugoslav people.

The Relief Mission Exposed

The ruthless statesman and practitioner of Realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck, seemed to be the model for Milan Stojadinović’s policies both domestic and foreign. While Yugoslavia’s prime minister appeared to match Bismarck in the scope of his ambitions, both contemporaries and historians have concluded that he lacked the requisite skill to make them bear fruit.

Coming off of what seemed to be a series of diplomatic coups, by the summer of 1936 Stojadinović had come to see himself as a sort of Yugoslav Bismarck, whose mastery of foreign policy had the entire continent dancing on his strings. Furthermore, Stojadinović believed that, like the Iron Chancellor, he was too valuable in his role as prime and foreign minister for the man to be subservient to the man to whom he nominally pledged his allegiance. Stojadinović had convinced himself that his careful maneuvering between the mutually suspicious nations of Europe had not only ensured Yugoslavia’s continued independence and survival but was actually was building something new. He envisioned uniting the Little Entente, the Balkan Pact, and the traditional French alliance with more recent efforts at wooing Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and now Spain to weld a pan-European anti-Communist alliance of which Yugoslavia would be the keystone. Little evidence is available to say definitively how seriously Stojadinović took this idea, but he clearly relished the idea of Yugoslavia playing the part of Bismarck’s Prussia, that is, of being closer to any European power than it was to any other.

In an arena populated by many masterful and dedicated intelligence operatives, Yugoslavia’s clumsy and inexperienced Military Intelligence Agency was unable to long conceal the real nature of the kingdom’s involvement in Spain.

The opportunity that Stojadinović saw for supplanting the impotent League of Nations with this new creation in the Spanish Civil War was a testament to his cunning, and to his hubris. What brought his lofty scheme crashing to the ground was the revelation of the real purpose of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain by agents of the Spanish Republican government, who were seeking to regain the initiative after the fall of Madrid in the middle of June. Shortly after the Olympic games had concluded, the British government was notified of the preponderance of Yugoslav military officers among the Relief Mission’s ranks, and of their meetings with counterparts among the German and Italian forces assisting the Nationalists. The resulting furor from London alarmed Prince Paul and he summoned Stojadinović for a private discussion. What passed between them has been disputed by both men and their respective camps since, but the immediate effect was the withdrawal of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain. If the upper echelons of the Yugoslav military, were upset with Paul’s interference into military affairs, they felt more than compensated by the diminishing of Stojadinović’s power and independence.

Its few months in Spain had not dramatically impacted the war, but the Relief Mission had served a valuable role in identifying a vanguard of Croatian anti-Communists within the military and bringing them to Belgrade’s attention. Even as Belgrade sought to smooth over relations with Britain in order to finalize lingering agreements on trade and investment, the men who had been sent to Spain were being welcomed back to Yugoslavia to privately brief the regency council and top-ranking officials on what lessons they had learned from their experiences.

The War Continues

Even before the loss of the unofficial Yugoslav military mission, the war in Spain seemed to have settled into a stalemate. While the Nationalists could point to their capture of Madrid and the encirclement of three Republican divisions near Granada, their foes could point to the high cost in men and material of those victories. While the Franco enjoyed the spectacle of Germany and Italy competing over their contributions to the Nationalist side of the conflict, the Republicans came to be more and more dependent on the Soviet Union. The loss of Madrid had not only been a blow to morale, it had also reduced the industrial and manpower base which the Republicans needed to win the war. Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union had been happy to make up the gap in exchange for hefty portions of the Spanish government’s gold reserves. Increasingly, Soviet guidance shaped not only the military aspects but also the politics of what was left of the Spanish Republic. Anarchists and groups advocating for regional autonomy were suppressed, sometimes violently, and elements of Marxist-Leninism increasingly crept into speeches and policies.

As the Spanish Civil War dragged on and the conflict grew more deadly and more ideological, it increasingly appeared to London and France that there was no side worth supporting in the conflict.

While international attention was drawn to the Spanish Civil War, and the reactions that potential allies and foes had to it, few devoted much thinking to the domestic politics of Yugoslavia and the dramatic change that the kingdom would undergo owing to the discovery of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission’s deception and its return home.