Do puppets in HOI4 not have a short ceasefire before they rejoin the war like in HOI3? France should be pretty helpful, especially with their navy added to Italy's in the Med.
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Woah, just read almost everything in one day, reminds me of an AAR I attempted once at Kaiserreich's old forum with Yugoslavia as well. 
This AAR looks pretty good, enjoying the way you narrate and how you describe political developments taking place in your game. Once I started I thought it would be some kind of Yugoslavia within OTL WW2 but I must recognize I'm so glad to be proven wrong:
The French Nationalist regime, Mussolini carrying the Axis, Hitler madness unleashed, those developments at China and the USA!
Fascinating stuff, I'll continue to watch closely.
This AAR looks pretty good, enjoying the way you narrate and how you describe political developments taking place in your game. Once I started I thought it would be some kind of Yugoslavia within OTL WW2 but I must recognize I'm so glad to be proven wrong:
The French Nationalist regime, Mussolini carrying the Axis, Hitler madness unleashed, those developments at China and the USA!
Fascinating stuff, I'll continue to watch closely.
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For whatever reason, without Man the Guns the US AI always seems to hire either Browder or Coughlin, or both, as an advisor, and then falls into Communism or Fascism without so much as a peep. I think that it works a little for this story, but it still would be a strange development for it to go over well!
Unfortunately with how the peace treaty worked out, Latvia wasn't able to be puppeted or annexed. Something about them not contributing enough troops to the fight, I'm sure.
Good note on Piasecki, and goes to show that I should have read his wikipedia page rather than go with my gut, but alas. I imagine then that he is serving as more of a placeholder, someone who is tolerable to both the fledgling Polish nationalists and, more importantly, to Berlin, but he could conceivably be sacked for one reason or the other. If memory serves he collaborated with the Soviet-installed regime in Poland after the war, so I don't think he was necessarily a man of strong ideological conviction, but that is just my cursory reading.
In HOI4, puppeted nations automatically get added to their masters' wars. There used to be some shenanigans in the earliest patches you could pull with puppeting a nation and keeping them out of the war to suddenly have their former allies cut off from supply and be easily destroyed but they fixed that. I agree that the French navy could help alter the balance of power on the sea, and as a cobelligerent in the Axis they will be much more cautious about leaving their ships where British planes could find them undefended than was the case OTL.
Woah, just read almost everything in one day, reminds me of an AAR I attempted once at Kaiserreich's old forum with Yugoslavia as well.
This AAR looks pretty good, enjoying the way you narrate and how you describe political developments taking place in your game. Once I started I thought it would be some kind of Yugoslavia within OTL WW2 but I must recognize I'm so glad to be proven wrong:
The French Nationalist regime, Mussolini carrying the Axis, Hitler madness unleashed, those developments at China and the USA!
Fascinating stuff, I'll continue to watch closely.
Well, thank you very much for your kind words! I am glad that you have enjoyed it thus far! It has been a strange journey from 1936 to here, but I daresay a fun one as well.
Unfortunately...
My savefile has somehow become irrecoverable and after a week or so of trying various methods (mainly uninstalling and reinstalling HOI4 several times, I'm not very techy), I think that I have to give up the gameplay as a lost cause. That being said, I would be happy to provide an epilogue to conclude the story, if anyone would be interested in reading one. I have a lot of ideas for what a post-war world might look like (as I'm sure everyone firing up the game does), mainly in the case of an Axis victory in Europe, but the close call with the early days of the war made me contemplate where losing the war might leave the Balkans as well. In any case, I am happy to continue to write and wrap up this project if there is someone willing to see this strange ship go down with a modicum of dignity.
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Epilogue is always good. And you can always give it another go, given this whole game didn't go anywhere quite what I expected.
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It seems like save files always get lost (it happened to my first two AARs). I will say, writing an epilogue and wrapping this up is a great idea. Even if it's not a perfect ending, you can still pride yourself on completing the AAR and telling an interesting story. There are a lot that never get finished, so it's a real accomplishment to do so.
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You have to wrap it up, it's been a thrilling ride and thus deserves a thrilling end by any means.
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Just got caught up again to discover the sad news re the save file. But still, with the Axis victories in Europe, it does at least provide a logical point at which to end this from a Yugoslav perspective, assuming a final victory in Greece and before any war against the USSR and/or the US. It’s been a great ride to this point.
But still, with the Axis victories in Europe, it does at least provide a logical point at which to end this from a Yugoslav perspective, assuming a final victory in Greece and before any war against the USSR and/or the US. It’s been a great ride to this point.- 1
If I remember correctly US in this timeline is communist, so war with one of them could very well mean war with both. So probably Fascist vs Communist Cold War is more likely than regular war
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Gran aporte, recién acabo una partida con Yugoslavia como gobierno comunista y me topo con este AAR, buena vibra saludosThe 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.
Entre los intentos de mano dura de integrar al pueblo de Yugoslavia, la restricción de las libertades políticas y la recesión económica, Alexander había sufrido una erosión constante de su popularidad. Esto fue más notable en Serbia, el supuesto bastión del régimen. Antes de la imposición de la dictadura real, al rey le gustaba visitar a la gente común en los pueblos de toda Yugoslavia. Posteriormente, sin embargo, estas giras improvisadas tuvieron que ser restringidas por temor a que un asesino las usara para derribar al rey. Entre los activistas comunistas, los serbios descontentos y los terroristas de Ustaše y IMRO, no faltaron enemigos potenciales.
El Ustaše fue la más grave de estas amenazas, con un gran mar de croatas en los que esconderse. Los separatistas también disfrutaron del apoyo clandestino de los gobiernos italiano y húngaro, que proporcionaron a Ustaše refugio, armas y entrenamiento con la esperanza de ganar territorio a expensas de Yugoslavia en el caos resultante. Para 1933, Ustaše había asesinado a cientos de empleados del gobierno y había volado cientos de trenes en el reino.
El Duce italiano, Benito Mussolini, creía que Alejandro era lo único que mantenía unida a Yugoslavia. Una vez que se fuera, el país caería en una guerra civil e Italia podría anexarse el territorio que deseaba. Con ese objetivo en mente, Roma cooperó con Ustaše y IMRO para formar un equipo para asesinar al rey durante su visita de estado a París. Vlado Chernozemski, un activista búlgaro de IMRO, con la ayuda de tres cómplices croatas, asesinó al rey Alejandro y al ministro de Relaciones Exteriores francés, Louis Barthou, en las calles de la Ciudad de las Luces antes de ser asesinado por la multitud indignada.
Coleccionista de arte y primo del rey asesinado, le tocó al príncipe Pablo administrar Yugoslavia y mantener unido el reino después de la muerte de Alejandro.
Sin embargo, las intrigas de Mussolini no dieron sus frutos. El reino resultó más fuerte de lo esperado y Yugoslavia no se vino abajo con la muerte de su rey. Tras el asesinato de su padre, la corona pasó al menor de edad Pedro II, que entonces sólo tenía once años. De acuerdo con el testamento de Alejandro, su primo, el príncipe Pablo, encabezó un consejo de regencia que gobernaría Yugoslavia hasta que Pedro alcanzara la mayoría de edad.
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.