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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Six: The Balance of Power, Part One (September 26th, 1936 to July 14th, 1937)

Lessons from the Spanish Civil War

While the war in Spain raged on with no clear end in sight, observers in Yugoslavia and elsewhere took eager note of the weapons and tactics employed by the Nationalists and the Republicans in their fraternal conflict and sought to adapt them to their own ends.

While the public was engrossed with the return of the Olympian Leon Štukelj to Yugoslavia and his subsequent tour of the kingdom, Belgrade was far more engrossed in the news and lessons borne by the returning men of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain. The most obvious gains were tactical and technological ones, gleaned from the officers sent to assist the Nationalist cause and their descriptions of the fighting that they had witnessed. Although their time in Spain had been short, the men’s reports had something to offer the military both offensively and defensively, as the upper echelons of the Yugoslav Royal Army were regaled with stories of battles fought in uneven terrain which disadvantaged the attacker and of the devastation wrought on soldiers by the aeroplanes and pilots supplied by Francisco Franco’s supporters in Berlin and Rome which were coordinated over radio waves.

The Spanish Civil War had demonstrated the importance of air power in wartime to the Yugoslav military. In light of these developments, the country’s outdated and undersized air force was to undergo a reevaluation and reequipment. This project, including the accompanying design and production of an indigenous fighter plane, was to be under the supervision of officers who were more skeptical of the direction of Yugoslavia’s foreign and domestic policies. It was hoped that the honor of the mission would placate them, and, if not, the work involved would keep them too busy to create problems.

Even the craft and caliber of the artillery used did not escape the Relief Mission’s notice, and efforts were undertaken to improve the quality and expand the scope of Yugoslavia’s domestic arms production in the face of expanded capabilities and diminishing exports from France and Czechoslovakia. Projects such as the Ikarus IK-2 fighter plane, which had been conceived with assistance and training from France, continued, but increasingly advances in military technology were midwifed with German research and capital. However, by the middle of 1937, the periodic infusions of foreign investment that had been fueling Yugoslavia’s economic growth had slowed to a trickle as trade partners in London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin were focusing on their own rearmament programs and unsure of Yugoslavia’s alignment in any future conflict. The terms of new loans and investment agreements were far more onerous than those that Belgrade had enjoyed in 1936. Stojadinović's foreign policy had ensured that Yugoslavia possessed no outright enemies, but also left her bereft of any friends. Such a deficit would need to be corrected eventually, but the prime minister’s attentions were dominated by developments closer to home.

The Evolution of Yugoslavism

With the kingdom’s borders seemingly secured, Prince Paul and Milan Stojadinović turned their attention to solidifying the Yugoslav state and people. The resulting combination of reorganization, encouragement, and crackdowns was dubbed “Evolution”, although critics of the government were quick to challenge the notion that Belgrade was moving forward and not, in fact, backward.

While the martial and technological information gleaned from the fighting in Spain was certainly valuable, it was greatly overshadowed by the political changes that the Relief Mission’s return to Yugoslavia engendered. The kingdom’s representatives had not only been able to witness the military side of the Nationalist campaign, but also some of its internal dynamics of personalities and politics. The picture that the combined reports painted showed Francisco Franco welding together the disparate groups of the Nationalist coalition into a unified front to fight back the Republic and its Communist supporters. Franco had managed to unite supporters of the deposed king Alfonso, the Carlists who supported a competing candidate for the throne, and the National Syndicalists, the Falange, with their republican leanings under his rule, to say nothing of the peasantry, the Catholic Church, and the often-squabbling military officers who had joined the Nationalist side.

Both Prince Paul and Milan Stojadinović took in this information with a great deal of interest. In some ways, the divisions in Yugoslavia ran much deeper than those in Spain, cutting as they did more frequently across ethnic and religious lines, at the same time the country was not in the midst of a civil war. What Franco had undertaken in his country seemed to provide a way forward for the regent and the prime minister. The former sought to unite the country of which he had been given stewardship. The latter sought to expand his own power and influence.

Despite the rosy predictions of its Great War-era proponents, by 1937 Yugoslavia still remained an idea rather than a real nation, with subjects generally holding allegiance to their own ethnic group in higher regard than loyalty to Yugoslavia, or to Belgrade. For nearly two decades after its creation, politicians had contented themselves with holding together the kingdom rather than try to engender any deep affection for it.

What followed was a radical realignment of Yugoslav politics. Since King Alexander’s assassination, Belgrade’s policy had to attempt to maintain the status quo and balance the interests of the Serb plurality against the other ethnic groups. Shoring up the support of the Slovenes and the Bosnian Muslims, the other “legs” of Stojadinović's “three-legged stool” occupied what little attention was not devoted to stamping out Croat and Macedonian terrorism and separatism. In such an atmosphere, a proactive policy that might actually advance Yugoslavism as an ideology and as a political program seemed unthinkable.

Yet, with Europe on the road to war, such a bold move was exactly what Paul and Stojadinović proposed to undertake. The resulting project contained some areas of mutual agreement between the two men, but it was also something over which they wrestled, each seeking to preserve and expand his own authority over that of his rival. Once the generals had gotten aboard, Stojadinović announced the next step for the kingdom’s political reordering. To a well-screened crowd of supporters who cheered at all of the appropriate parts of his speech, the prime minister announced a merger between his party, the Yugoslav Radical Union, and the United Militant Labour Organization, or ZBOR.

Although both organizations were undoubtedly nationalistic and inspired, and some believed guided, by foreign movements, the Yugoslav Radical Union and ZBOR had fiercely contested ideological disputes over the role of the monarchy and religion in Yugoslavia. Where the Radical Union possessed a reputation of greater pragmatism and corruption, ZBOR’s youthful character struck observers as more revolutionary, and more violent.

The move was a surprising one given ZBOR’s small size and radical politics. Founded in 1935 as a Yugoslav movement inspired by German National Socialism and earning less than one percent of the vote in that year’s parliamentary elections, it was seen by most students of the kingdom’s political scene as a vehicle for Berlin’s interests in the country and for the ego of its leader, Dimitrije Ljotić. ZBOR advocated for Ljotić’s vision of a corporatist nation and a planned economy under an anti-parliamentary constitutional monarchy, but received little opportunity to put this agenda into action while outside of the government. Ljotić’s rash rhetoric was tempered by his strong loyalty to the ruling House of Karađorđević and his powerful connections; he was cousin to Milan and Milutin Nedić. It was through them that Paul and Stojadinović decided to approach the firebrand. These were not the only connections that ZBOR and its leadership had, however. The party had been the recipient of no small amount of support from Berlin, directed by German envoy Viktor von Heeren and funneled through German conglomerates operating in Yugoslavia. This attention earned the party the ire of those in the kingdom who saw the party as a cipher for Berlin’s interests in the country. Further complicating maters had been the section of German leadership, led by Adolf Hitler’s number two man, Hermann Goering himself, which preferred to support Milan Stojadinović and his Radical Union party. While the merger caused confusion and consternation in Yugoslavia it had the additional effect of reconciling hitherto dueling German efforts to influence Belgrade’s politics and policies.

The precise conditions of the merger were complicated and exact, but the broad overview is that the Radical Union, owing to its much greater size and role in the government would retain its name and the vast majority of leadership positions in the new entity. Furthermore, the Radical Union’s concept of Yugoslavism, with its explicit rejection of “narrow ethnic or religious chauvinism”, would remain the party’s guiding philosophy. Stojadinović, who had long harbored ambitions to transform the Radical Union into a mass party, gained a core of devoted young men who would advance the party’s message, and a toehold in the military as well despite the generals’ hostility towards him personally. Stojadinović had spent years working to become the “national” leader of Yugoslavia’s Serbs in the same way that his coalition partners in the Radical Union were widely regarded as the leaders of the kingdom’s Slovenian and Bosnian Muslim populations, and in the same way that Stjepan Radić and now Vladko Maček were seen as the leaders of the country’s Croats through their leadership of the Croatian Peasant Party. The failure of Stojadinović to accomplish this during his stint as prime minister owed much to his reputation for corruption and untrustworthiness, as well as to the size of the kingdom’s Serb population and its relative contentment with the status quo.

Milan Stojadinović, flagged by his chief aide, Ivo Andrić, during a state visit to Italy. In his capacities as Yugoslavia’s prime minister as well as her foreign minister, Stojadinović was well-poised to observe foreign political developments and to try and adapt them to his own country. A hardnosed cynic rather than a fervent ideologue, Stojadinović was willing to push boundaries but not at the cost of his personal power.

Stojadinović was as pragmatic as he was ambitious, however. He was more than willing to advance the cause of a unitary Yugoslav nationalism in contrast to the old Radical Union’s policy of preserving the current level of ethnic autonomy, as long as he was the new party’s leader. The prime minister had long looked to Benito Mussolini as a model, and the merger seemed to advance his goals as well. As Count Ciano observed, “He liked the Mussolini formula: strength and consensus. King Alexander had only strength. Stojadinović wants to popularize his dictatorship.” To this end, shortly after being appointed prime minister, Stojadinović had attempted to create a cult of personality around himself and to form a paramilitary wing of his party, the “Greenshirts”. No one was more skeptical of Stojadinović's intentions than Prince Paul, who was well aware of how Mussolini had sidelined the Italian monarchy when he had come to power.

Regarded by his opponents as a demagogue who owed his position to family connections and foreign intrigues, Dimitrije Ljotić entered the government under a cloud of suspicion. Owing to Ljotić’s position in the Transportation Ministry, some foreign wits joked that Yugoslavia had brought in a Fascist solely to have the kingdom’s trains run on time.

What did Ljotić and ZBOR receive from joining the Radical Union? In exchange for ceasing his and his follower’s infrequent outbursts regarding the supremacy of Serbs and Orthodoxy within Yugoslavia, Ljotić was able to secure a post in the government as the Minister of Transportation, with an understanding that he may be granted the educational portfolio or even his old title as Minister of Justice should the merger prove successful. In addition, ZBOR’s youth wing, the White Eagles, replaced the abortive Greenshirts and became the undisputed organization of the hitherto rudderless young men within the Radical Union’s orbit. This ensured Ljotić a strong power base, and one that would only grow in influence as more men graduated through the White Eagle’s program and secured jobs and posts through party patronage.

Milan Nedić, along with his brother, Milutin, served as the chief umpires for the merger between the Radical Union and ZBOR, tempering the expectations of both Stojadinović and Ljotić and giving the joint project the unofficial approval of the Royal Yugoslav Army, although it was far from unanimous.

The military was happy to see Stojadinović's authority divided, as the prime minister was unable to exercise the same level direct control over the new Radical Union that he could before the merger. The Nedić brothers were confident that they could guide their cousin along the proper path, especially with Milan serving as the Minister of the Army and Navy in the new government. Furthermore, the young recruits funneled to the military through the ranks of the White Eagles proved a helpful salve for the Royal Yugoslav Army’s chronic manpower shortage. A revived sense of Yugoslavism, it was hoped, would reinvigorate the armed forces with a stronger sense of purpose and cohesion, and, eventually bring in men outside of the army’s base of Serb and Montenegrin recruits. Some unease was expressed that a wider pool of recruits and the revamped state ideology would imperil the hold of the predominantly Serb leadership over their army. Furthermore, even with his powerful relations, Ljotić was liked by a minority of the general staff, and trusted by even fewer. The air force in particular was the least enamored with the political shakeup.

And what of Prince Paul? On a basic level, the fact that the impetus for the merger had come from the regency council and not from the prime minister was a powerful rebuke of Stojadinović's republican tendencies. While acknowledging its roles in uniting the Italian people, Paul’s modest personality was opposed to the flamboyant and cultish nature of Mussolini’s Fascist movement and was wary of Stojadinović's ambitions in that direction. More importantly, however, the regent sought stability for Yugoslavia, not in the sense of wanting to appease the radicals for the sake of social peace, but in the sense of wishing to hold together the kingdom in order for it to be passed to King Peter when he came of age. Paul’s initial desire to maintain the status quo he had inherited from Alexander had run into great difficulties. In his diary he agonized frequently over the troubles facing the kingdom and resolved that, in domestic affairs at least, two options were available to him: attempt to reinvigorate Yugoslavism with a new sense of energy and purpose or to begin moving the kingdom away from a unitary system and towards a more federated collection of people. While Alexander had always been more skeptical of the project, Paul was much more of a true believer in the Yugoslav idea. To him, a Yugoslavia which was a federation broken up on ethnic lines seemed to be admitting defeat and giving up on the possibility of uniting the South Slav people into one nation. Furthermore, while the first option was risky, but the second seemed as though only a temporary solution. Going down that route, Paul feared, would spell the end of Yugoslavia, if not before than almost certainly during Peter’s reign. It was not an easy choice to make, especially for a man reluctant by nature to wield power, but in order to secure the legacy for Peter and to save his country, Paul acted how he thought best.

“I call our party the three-legged chair, on which it was possible to sit when necessary, although a chair with four legs is far more stable.” – Milan Stojadinović. The attempt to centralize the Yugoslav Radical Union risked losing the prime minister the support of his Slovenian and Bosnian Muslim coalition partners, Father Anton Korošec and Mehmed Spaho, and leaving him in charge of only a renamed Serb Radical Party.

The immediate reaction to this move was hostile. The Radical Union was not in fact a unified political organization, but rather a coalition of ethnic parties. While Stojadinović had authority to speak for the Serbian Radical Party, his attempts to brow-beat the Slovene People’s Party and the Yugoslav Muslim Organization into endorsing the merger with ZBOR failed miserably, as the leaders of both groups, Father Anton Korošec and Mehmed Spaho, respectively, issued dire statements warning of Serb chauvinism which would tear the country apart. While both resigned their positions in the government in protest, their followers were more conflicted. The Radical Union, the name which Stojadinović kept for his newly reconstituted party, was the key for many to political patronage and secure employment. Self-interest and some curiosity about where this move would lead kept a not insignificant minority of Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims in line.

Abroad, the merger of parties was seen as a confirmation of Yugoslavia’s alignment with the revisionist powers. It was accordingly praised in Berlin and Rome and condemned in London and Moscow, much to Paul’s chagrin, although Paris was studiously neutral on the whole manner. Newspaper men in Britain interpreted the move as an attempt to build a discriminatory regime based on Serb supremacy, ignoring Belgrade’s protestations to the contrary. The chief source of disagreement among the papers of renown was whether Paul or Stojadinović was more to blame for this move. Matters were not helped by Mussolini’s enthusiastic endorsement of the merger of parties, with the Duce proclaiming that Yugoslavia was stepping into the future alongside Italy and Germany.

The worst fears of both domestic and international critics seemed to be confirmed when Belgrade followed this move with a renewed campaign against the Ustaše. “What terrors will these Serbian Nazis visit upon the Croatian people?” one British parliamentarian asked. All concerned held their breath.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Seven: The Balance of Power, Part Two (September 26th, 1936 to July 14th, 1937)

The Campaign Against the Ustaše

Since the unification of Yugoslavia, life in Croatia had been marked by periodic bouts of violence by Croatian separatists and reprisals by Belgrade. The low-grade war had become an unpleasant but accepted fact of life within the kingdom.

For over a decade, the Ustaše terrorist organization had been committing violence in order to advance its goal of a Croatian state independent of Yugoslavia. The assassinations and bombings had eventually numbed much of the public in Yugoslavia, with only the most egregious cases making the front page of Belgrade newspapers. Periodic patrols and raids in Croatian cities and towns turned up some members of the Ustaše, but it seemed as though there were always more supplies flowing into the troublesome region from Italy and Hungary and an inexhaustible supply of angry young men to recruit to their cause.

After years of maintaining the violent status quo, the Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty of 1936 was the first step towards resolving the Ustaše problem. With Rome turning off the spigot of guns and explosives and handing over high-ranking Ustaše members and the location of safehouses to Belgrade, the terrorists suffered a significant setback and their response was to grow even more violent. Some of Leon Štukelj’s scheduled stops in Croatia had to be canceled for fear of violence against the Olympian or the crowds gathered to see him. Something needed to be done, and, with the reorganization of the Yugoslav Radical Union party, it was felt that there was an opportunity to open a new front against the Ustaše and win a significant victory for the governing coalition.

The government’s response to the Ustaše threat had long been characterized as meting out terror in answer to terror. The harsh methods of the army’s campaign against the Ustaše may have worked to deter further attacks in the short term, but they did little to endear the population to rule from Belgrade.

Since the Ustaše’s campaign of terror had begun, the government’s response had been strictly military. Officers and soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army were in charge of sweeping for terrorist cells and weapon caches. What little thought was given towards winning over the allegiance of the kingdom’s Croat population was often overshadowed by the brutality with which the military carried out its missions. Ordinary civilians could be hauled in for a military-style interrogation, and the many stories of brutality which resulted from these tribunals helped to feed the Ustaše’s ranks and broaden its network of support.

When Stojadinović emerged from the first meeting of the entire royal cabinet since the reformation of his Radical Union party to announce a new campaign against the Ustaše, many assumed that it be another purely military campaign. In the days immediately following the announcement, some in the army speculated that the Nedić brothers and their cousin Ljotić had persuaded the prime minister and Prince Paul to remove some of the restrictions on their operations in Croatia and that a more brutal, and they believed more effective, war against the terrorists could be waged.

Engendering a loyal Croatian population was something that had long been batted around as an alternative to the military’s pacification strategy, but previous efforts to approach Croatians as fellow Yugoslavs instead of as potential Ustaše members had withered on the vine without the active support of the prime minister or the regent.

Such voices were subsequently confused and chagrined by the details that followed the campaign’s announcement. Instead of remaining solely under the military’s authority, Stojadinović assigned the civilian government a greater role in the army’s activities in Croatia in order to prevent unnecessary abuses of innocent Croats and to associate any successful campaign with his own person. Many of the men chosen to liaison between Belgrade and military were long-time party loyalists hand-picked by Stojadinović, but others were members of the ZBOR. Their actual ability to interfere with day-to-day decisions was greatly overblown by outraged officers, but the appointees’ ability to report wrongdoing back to Belgrade felt like a leash to men who had become accustomed to a great deal of autonomy in their handling of the Ustaše problem.

A part of the Radical Union’s new approach to the issue of Croat separatism was to gather information about conditions and attitudes within the region and to offer targeted economic and social concessions which might win Croat support for the government or, at the least, blunt the appeal of the Ustaše’s message of violence and independence. Projects for internal development and the opening of new state- or foreign-managed factories in predominantly Croat areas allowed for Belgrade to provide employment opportunities to a group among the kingdom’s subjects which had felt most neglected by the government’s recovery programs. Social programs, which were administered as locally as was feasible in the tense atmosphere of the crackdown, allowed further opportunities to put a friendlier face on the Yugoslav government and to hear complaints by Croats without either side of the conversation feeling threatened by gunfire. Zagreb was the test case for these social relief programs and, following successes and modifications, they were gradually expanded out to towns and eventually some of the larger villages. There was some grumbling among the region’s population of Serbs and other non-Croat ethnicities about the positions set-aside for Croatians in these programs while Croat critics believed that the programs did not go far enough, but Stojadinović and his Radical Union deputies assured skeptics in the former camp that this degree of ethnic favoritism would be revisited in three years’ time, when it would likely be ended.

The pay and benefits of the Royal Yugoslav Army, as well as the social prestige associated with the military in the martially-minded Kingdom of Yugoslavia, helped to supplement the veterans of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain with a class of young Croat recruits.

While Stojadinović and Ljotić had never enjoyed much popularity among the kingdom’s armed forces, Milan Nedić was seen as a stalwart military man by his fellow soldiers. His part in crafting this new approach was seen by some members of the general staff as a grave betrayal, especially when he forced through a decree creating several purely Croatian brigades to assist with the policing of the region. Initially, these brigades were formed from Croats already serving in the Royal Yugoslav Army, particularly those who had been to Spain as part of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission. As the campaign continued, however, recruits began to be accepted from the civilian Croat population and, eventually, even low-ranking Ustaše members who turned themselves in and undergone a period of probation were allowed to join. This raised howls of outrage for bypassing the army’s normal process of recruitment, as well as ignoring the army’s unofficial policy of fiercely dividing soldiers from other ethnic groups between units with a majority of Serbs or Montenegrins. The ghost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Slavic divisions had refused to fight for their German and Magyar masters was wielded like a bludgeon by critics of the Croatian units.

In response to the ongoing threat of Ustaše assassinations and bombings, the Yugoslav government launched an extensive effort to identify and neutralize the group’s leadership. Intelligence gleaned from Italian and Croat sources was invaluable, but at times it nonetheless felt as though the government was waging war against a hydra.

Most of the initial cadre of leaders of the Ustaše were either caught up by the initial wave of arrests or hiding abroad, but the new leaders quickly rose to take control of the group’s operations. Plans for reprisal were hastily thrown together, and Croatia threatened to become an even deadlier than usual hotbed of assassinations and bombings. The initial attacks were not sustained, however, as the new leadership of the Ustaše suffered from issues of supply, experience, and coordination, all of which were exacerbated by the government’s interference. Belgrade had insisted that this latest campaign against the Ustaše terrorists make clear distinctions between the organization’s leadership and its foot soldiers. As mentioned earlier, the latter, when arrested, were offered chances to turn against their higher-ups and provide information in exchange for reduced, or even abrogated, prison sentences. While some of the true believers proved resistant, others in the Ustaše, the younger men and more recent recruits, were eager for the chance to return to work and support their families. The information they turned over allowed for the government to target the second generation of Ustaše leadership and put the separatists on the defensive. As a condition of their release, the Croatian turncoats not only were required to turn in their weapons and swear an oath of allegiance to Yugoslavia and King Peter, but they were also exposed to Yugoslavist ideas through lectures and conversations, mostly with Croatian members of the military, which led to a number of new recruits for the Royal Yugoslav Army, and its increasingly uneasy generals.

The influx of men flooding into the Royal Yugoslav Army from ZBOR and Croatia brought with them undeniable enthusiasm and patriotism, but their rougher character and ethnic background caused the military establishment to view them with suspicion even as it begrudgingly outfitted and equipped them.

Ultimately, the Croatian units raised during the Ustaše campaign would be folded into other units of the Royal Yugoslav Army after peace had been restored to Croatia. Along with the recruits brought in by the White Eagles, the influx of manpower helped fill gaps in existing formations, but some officers viewed the new soldiers under their command as a poisoned chalice. Having been exposed to a more robust vision of Yugoslavism because of the efforts of the new Radical Union, these men were less beholden to the traditional military leadership of the kingdom and many of these young men proved eager evangelists for the creation of a new Yugoslavia which would be a unified whole rather than a collection of squabbling ethnic groups.

The Fourth Leg of the Stool

While support for the new Radical Union may not have run very deep among its new members, the successful campaign and apparent end of the Ustaše threat swelled the party’s ranks, and reinforced Stojadinović’s bruised ego.

Rather than hardening Croatian opposition to Belgrade’s rule, the elimination of the Ustaše as a significant force was met with relief or at least resignation. The combination of tactics employed in the latest crackdown on the terrorist group was far less harsh than what had been anticipated in the dire predictions of Belgrade’s critics, and the olive branches offered to ordinary Croats helped to engender hope that the new Radical Union was something different from its predecessor. While the Croatian Peasant Party continued to maintain high levels of support with its vision of a federalized Yugoslavia, younger and more ambitious Croats, especially those who had ties of friendship or family to those serving in the armed forces, began to join the Radical Union. The tentative growth of Croats within the party seemed to vindicate Prince Paul’s hopes for creating a truly Yugoslav political movement, even if Stojadinović took most of the public credit. The growth of a Croatian wing within the Radical Union as the “fourth leg” of Stojadinović’s stool also had the effect of chastising the Slovenian and Bosnian Muslim politicians who had hitherto been skeptical of the new Radical Union. Fearful of being locked out of power by a Serb-Croat supermajority, Mehmed Spaho grudgingly led his Yugoslav Muslim Organization to rejoin the Radical Union, while Father Korošec held out for a while longer in hopes that the Croatian support for the party would evaporate and leave Slovenes with a stronger bargaining position.

The growing Croat contingent within the Radical Union also alarmed the Serbs who had taken their dominance of the party and the country for granted. Stojadinović was denounced in some circles for selling out Serbdom and moves were made to organize a party solely devoted to Serb interests ahead of the 1938 parliamentary elections. While most of the Serb opposition to the Radical Union was unable to agree upon a common platform and went their separate ways, one group was formed which would have an outsized impact on Yugoslav politics in the coming months: the Serb Cultural Club. The loose organization was not strictly a party organization, but its intellectual membership and its motto, “a strong Serbian identity – a strong Yugoslavia”, held the ring of politics. The group’s goals were to foster a stronger sense of Serb identity within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a project in direct opposition to the goal of the new Yugoslav Radical Union, and the two visions would soon clash in a dramatic fashion.

Farewell to Old Friendships and Alliances

The failure to eradicate or at least to maintain the Republican pocket in the north of the country was a setback for the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. While the Republicans and their supporters were energized by this development, the failure led to heightened tensions between the different members of the Nationalist coalition.

Ironically, just as Belgrade was implementing changes inspired by the organization of the Nationalist coalition, Francisco Franco’s forces were faced with setbacks on multiple fronts. The internal unity that the generalissimo had forced upon his mutually antagonistic partners was coming undone as more and more battles were lost and blame was thrown about from one group to the next. Meanwhile, the Republicans appeared to be benefitting from the harsh but disciplined methods encouraged by the Communists backed by the Soviet Union. The Republican forces had forced their way through Nationalist lines and reconnected with the loyal territories of the country’s north, giving the Spanish Republicans easier access to the Atlantic Ocean and therefore aid and supplies from abroad. Despite this reversal of fortunes on the battlefield, neither side was prepared to admit defeat and by the summer of 1937 the civil war still appeared set to continue for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, whether driven by King Carol’s personal whims or out of a strategy to outpace Yugoslavia’s realignment in that direction, Romania continued its dramatic shift in foreign policy to a closer alignment with the revisionist powers. The previous year’s trade and investment treaty signed with Germany was now supplemented by Romanian feelers towards Hungary. The cover was a meeting was arranged between members of the Little Entente and Budapest at the resort town of Bled in Slovenia. Romania’s allies were fobbed off with assurances that the meeting would be one to discuss the minority rights of Hungarians in the Little Entente member states and to review the enforcement mechanisms of the Treaty of Trianon and that no decisions would be made to loosen restrictions on Hungary’s military without Belgrade and Prague’s assent. Despite his own misgivings and those of Prince Paul, Stojadinović agreed to host the conference on Yugoslav territory. The radical reorganization of the country’s politics and the ongoing campaign against the Ustaše meant that the prime minister was ill-disposed towards alienating the kingdom’s foreign allies, fragile as those bonds may be. The trust that was placed in Bucharest, and in Carol, ultimately proved to be wholly unfounded.

The unilateral foreign policy of Milan Stojadinović had helped Yugoslavia maneuver between the Great Powers, but the selfish and devious example that he had set for other mid-sized European states ended up burying the Little Entente alliance at Bled.

While the main conference ended in a stalemate, behind the scenes negotiations between the Romanian and the Hungarian envoys had produced a bilateral agreement, humiliatingly named after the Yugoslav town in which it was conceived behind Belgrade’s back. Despite Hungary’s continued desire to recover Transylvania, the two countries had a common, albeit temporary, interest in developing a more congenial bilateral relationship rather than maintain a degree of hostility that could be exploited by a third power such as Germany. Accordingly, the Bled Agreement saw the Romanian government renounce its intent to uphold key provisions of the Treaty of Trianon, opting instead to view measures to curtail the nascent Hungarian air force or restricted armaments as “unnecessary impediments to the maintenance of peace between our two countries”. In return, Bucharest received Hungarian promises to not seek to change the status of Transylvania by force. Much of the Bled Agreement permitted what Budapest had already accomplished, but the skullduggery with which it had been negotiated insulted and alarmed Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The alliance would continue its existence on paper, but absent a united front against any of its potential foes, the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia was dead.

While Prince Paul and others were reshaping Yugoslavia’s government coalition, Pierre Laval and his supporters were hard at work shoring up the National Bloc in France by targeting appeals to different interest groups.

Yugoslavia’s other security partner from the 1920’s also seemed to have lost what little interest it still possessed in the Balkans. The new French government, beset by occasional strikes by the Communists and hardline socialists that it had driven underground, was attempting to shore up the coalition of the right through appeals to the country’s businessmen and farmers. The support of the former was earned through the passing of stronger laws for the protection of private property, with the understanding that the government would not attempt to replicate the German or Italian governments model of “coordinating” private companies and individuals to advance ambitious government projects. Paris claimed that such rights were fundamental to the preservation of other rights, but the opposition in the Chamber of Deputies decried what it saw as an alliance between big business and reactionary nationalism directed against the working class.

The Dictatorship Without a Dictator

Despite the wide-ranging powers granted to him by the Alexandrine constitution, Prince Paul’s taciturn rule had allowed other centers of power to develop in Yugoslavia, centers which competed with the regency for power and prestige in the kingdom.

The efforts to build a mass-oriented nationalist political movement in Yugoslavia alarmed those within and without the kingdom, but one factor temporarily calmed all but the most pessimistic of voices. For all of the power which the Yugoslav constitution had centralized and for all of the energy and vigor with which the government had set out to build a durable coalition among the kingdom’s subjects, the fact remained that real power in Yugoslavia was not concentrated in the hands of one man as it was in Germany, Italy, or the Soviet Union.

When Paul had assumed the regency, his cautious temperament and respect for the deceased Alexander and the young King Peter had led him to eschew the powers which he held by virtue of his role as head of state. Some wits had dubbed Yugoslavia “a dictatorship without a dictator” on account of the prince’s reluctance to rule in the authoritarian manner of his cousin. But in the years since the passage of power, the vacuum of power had grown so great as to draw in other aspirants. Prime Minister Stojadinović fancied himself as a Yugoslav Mussolini who would hold real power while sidelining the monarchy, and members of the military high command held similar views about the limited role that the crown should play in the running of the kingdom. In the face of these challenges, Paul faced the unenviable choice of letting one of these other power centers seize control or working to actively contest them by stepping into the arena himself. The success of the campaign against the Ustaše had left the government, and the Yugoslav Radical Union, riding high, but who ruled the country was still an unanswered question, and one that would not be solved easily.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Eight: The Concordat (July 14th, 1937 to December 2nd, 1937)

Loose Ends: Yugoslavia’s Slovenes and the Macedonians

The rupture between Father Anton Korošec and Prime Minister Stojadinović inspired some more independently-minded Slovene organizations to split from the hitherto-dominant Slovene People’s Party.

The longer that he kept his followers outside of the Yugoslav Radical Union, the more that Father Anton Korošec worried about the influence of Slovenes in the kingdom, and his own power, eroding. His negotiations with Stojadinović were hindered by the addition of some Croatian support to the government coalition and challenges to Korošec’s party by rival Slovene political movements which agitated for a more aggressive visions for Slovenia which variously included independence, war with Italy over the Istrian peninsula, or both. To rein in these radical nationalists, Stojadinović and Korošec hastily brought the Slovene People’s Party back into the fold with the promises of a ministerial post for the priest and a greater degree of autonomy for the local Slovene government in the cultural and economic spheres. Offers of partnerships with local industrialists to improve local infrastructure and expand their operations into the rest of the country also sweetened the pot. A key point of compromise in the agreement was the stipulation that the degree of self-rule granted the Slovenes was based on the geographical Drava banovina rather than their status as an ethnic group distinct from other Yugoslav subjects.

The Macedonian terrorist organization IMRO had long been the second-greatest threat to Yugoslavia’s internal stability. With the crippling of the Ustaše, Belgrade’s attention turned to the Bulgarian-backed separatists.

With the Croatians more or less reconciled to the state and the Slovenes returning to the fold of the Yugoslav Radical Union, Prince Paul and Prime Minister Stojadinović now turned their attentions to the kingdom’s Macedonian population. The region of Macedonia had passed from the rule of the dying Ottoman Empire to the Balkan states of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece following a number of wars in the years leading up to the Great War. Despite efforts to reconcile the Macedonians to their status within Serbia and later Yugoslavia, a sense of Macedonian identity began to emerge which sought to unite all Macedonian territories and people into one state. The concept was promoted by the Communist International and the Bulgarian government, both of whom were instrumental in supporting the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, or IMRO. While never reaching the level of notoriety that the Ustaše achieved, the IMRO still posed a threat to the unity and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, especially as Bulgaria, like Hungary, began to cast about for a great power patron to champion Sofia’s territorial claims.

In the years immediately following the failed Zveno coup in 1934 which temporarily brought a pro-Yugoslavia and pro-French government to power in Sofia, Belgrade had practiced a defensive and reactionary posture with regards to agitation among the kingdom’s Macedonian population, leading to the border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria becoming one of the most fortified in the region. As with the early campaigns against the Ustaše in Croatia, the Royal Yugoslav Army would conduct raids and sweep the countryside for hideouts and caches of weapons following attacks launched by the IMRO, but these moves failed to tear out the terrorist group by the root, and the heavy-handed response alienated a sizable percentage of the local population.

In the light of the success against the Croat terrorists that Belgrade’s new approach had accomplished, many in Macedonia; terrorists, soldiers, and civilians alike; prepared themselves for a similar effort at disrupting the IMRO while appealing to the local citizenry. Macedonia’s more rural character and closer proximity to foreign support made it a more challenging prospect than Croatia, and it was predicted that such a campaign would take much longer, be much more costly in terms of lives and funds, and be less successful at winning the population over to the vision of Yugoslavism promoted by the evolved Radical Union.

After being liberated from the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia was divided between Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Macedonian nationalists sought to unify their countrymen in one state, with the IMRO serving as the most prominent and deadly example.

An alternative solution was put forward by Milan Stojadinović at a meeting of ministers and generals. The success of the Ustaše campaign after years of ineffectiveness had chastened the commanders of the Royal Yugoslav Army, but the prime minister’s latest scheme seemed even more radical. In response to a facetious suggestion to hand over Macedonia and its troublesome population to Bulgaria outright, Stojadinović proposed approaching local Macedonian leaders who were known to have ties to the IMRO and arranging a meeting between the government and the separatists. The military was horrified that the prime minister would even consider working with one of the organizations responsible for the brazen assassination of King Alexander, but their anger gave way to something else as Stojadinović elaborated over their loud and repeated objections. The IMRO sought to unify all Macedonians within one state, but why should that be solely to the benefit of Bulgaria? A properly conducted approach, he argued, could harness the IMRO and turn it from a threat into an ally of Yugoslav interests in the Balkans.

Again, the military privately fumed, but ultimately a majority of them went along with the other government ministers and Prince Paul and approved of Stojadinović’s ambitious scheme, although not without deep reservations. To that end, Macedonians were granted a degree of concessions falling somewhere between the outright wooing of the kingdom’s Croat population and the implicit support which her Slovene subjects received. Efforts to turn the Macedonians into Serbs were curtailed, only to be replaced with Yugoslavist indoctrination which, pervasive as it was, did not attempt to strip Macedonians of their self-image but to instead complement it with a greater sense of belonging to the South Slav nation.

Military Developments

The General Staff appointed former Chief of the General Staff Ljubomir Marić to evaluate the kingdom’s military and to serve as the architect of Yugoslavia’s updated military doctrines on the strength of his 1928 work Fundamentals of Strategy, his Serb ethnicity, and his personal popularity. Part of Marić’s work included the development of hypothetical war plans against the kingdom’s neighbors.

In order to persuade the generals to support more of the Radical Union’s domestic agenda, Yugoslavia’s civilian leaders had to promise the army more support and a chance for it to heighten its already formidable prestige within the kingdom. To that end, Belgrade began planning for war.

It was not enough for the generals to equip their forces with the latest technologies, they also needed to understand how to utilize them. To this end, small-scale maneuvers were conducted using the small Yugoslav air force. The aim of these exercises was to incorporate air power into the offensive and defensive strategies which would be utilized in the event of war. Given the kingdom’s modest industrial base, the general staff decided against developing an air doctrine based on strategic bombing. Yugoslavia was simply not capable of the aircraft production necessary to produce wings of various types of bombers and their escorts. Furthermore, a truly independent air force, as opposed to one subservient to the Royal Yugoslav Army, would be another competitor for prestige and power.

Supplied generously with resources in order to provide work and secure the loyalty of the military, the air arm of the Yugoslav army, under the leadership of General Dušan Simović, was able to cobble together a rudimentary scheme for operating in wartime. Such tactics could not be fully tested and evaluated, however, before the outbreak of war.

The smaller size of countries in the Balkans, and the uncertainty of public support in the event of hostilities, made the General Staff reject the idea of a long war which would necessitate a bombing campaign to break the enemy willpower. Instead, the generals counted on Yugoslavia’s larger and better-trained army and sizable industry when compared to many of its neighbors to break through enemy lines and rapidly gain enough territory to bring an end to the war. To aid in this plan, planes and pilots were molded to serve in support roles for the army first and foremost, including winning air superiority and softening up entrenched enemy positions.

Such plans were almost entirely developed with an eye towards conflict with one of the other Balkan countries, such as Hungary. In the event of war with a great power, Yugoslavia’s generals were still pessimistic regarding the kingdom’s chances, short of assistance from a larger ally. Such diplomacy was still the provision of Stojadinović, and this dependence was a constant irritant for his opponents in the military.

The Concordat and Its Discontents

The pacification of Croatia was informally commemorated with the expansion of the already impressive University of Zagreb, one of the three flagship universities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Education had long been neglected during the years of turmoil and financial insolvency, but expanding access to schooling, some would say indoctrination, was a key tenant of the new Yugoslav Radical Union’s program.

Following the resignation of the fierce and controversial Serb Bogoljub Kujundžić, the Slovene leader Father Anton Korošec returned to the government to fill the vacated Minister of Education post. In a speech commemorating the expansion of the University of Belgrade, Korošec spoke primarily on the role that education could and should play in uniting the groups of Yugoslavia into a true nation. He lamented the fact that half of the kingdom’s subjects were illiterate, but pointed to the great duty and ability of the three Yugoslav universities of Belgrade, Llubjana, and Zagreb to rectify the lack of education in the country. These parts of the minister’s speech were well-received, as were his other educational proposals, but all were overshadowed by his brief announcement of the resumption of concordat negotiations between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Catholic Church.

His holiness, Pope Pius XII, was present at the negotiation of the 1914 Concordat between the Vatican and Serbia in his role as assistant-secretary of state, and participated in the initial stages of the renegotiation of the concordat with Yugoslavia shortly before his elevation to the papacy.

Relations between the Kingdom of Serbia and the Vatican had been cordial enough before the outbreak of the Great War, with a concordat being signed between the two a mere four days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The 1914 Concordat was a fairly innocuous agreement regarding the rights and responsibilities of the Catholic Church and the Serbian government, and it proved entirely workable with the small population of Catholics inside of the kingdom. The war’s conclusion, however, saw Serbia transform into Yugoslavia, with a large population of devout Croat and Slovene Catholics. The tensions between groups frequently blurred matters of ethnicity and religion, and the predominant place given to the Serbian Orthodox Church in Yugoslavia hindered efforts to integrate the kingdom’s Catholic subjects. Some Catholic figures estimated that 200,000 of the kingdom’s Catholic subjects converted to Serbian Orthodoxy since unification for reasons of political and economic advancement. Until the 1930’s efforts to update the concordat to account for the vastly increased number of Catholics floundered against objections by the Orthodox Church and the Serb interests which held most of the kingdom’s political and military power. It was only with the evolution of the Yugoslav Radical Union’s ideology, and the need for greater Croat and Slovene support for the government following the successful neutralization of the Ustaše, which gave Stojadinović the political cover to update the agreement with the Vatican.

The young and passionate Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac, was an ardent advocate for the Catholics in the kingdom. He reserved his support for Yugoslavia “with the condition that the state acts towards the Catholic Church as it does to all just denominations and that it guarantees them freedom.”

The new agreement expanded the rights and privileges of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, granting it equal status with the Serbian Orthodox Church in most matters, although special recognition was afforded Orthodoxy as one of the sources of strength and inspiration which freed Serbia from Ottoman servitude and led to the creation of the unified Yugoslav kingdom. The tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church was reaffirmed, and provisions were set aside for funding churches and religious education in Slovenia and Croatia, although the amount was still less than that set aside in the state budget for similar upkeep and expansion of Orthodox institutions.

Despite its measured character, the concordat signed between Belgrade and the Vatican was met with fury by the country’s devout Orthodox population and by Serb chauvinists. Both groups saw the updated agreement as a threat to the predominant place of Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church in Yugoslavia. Despite the concordat stipulating that Archbishops in Yugoslavia must swear loyalty to the crown and not conspire against the state, members of the Serb Cultural Club held that the new concordat threatened the independence of the monarchy, and was the latest in a series of moves where Belgrade was advantaging every other group in the kingdom at the expense of the Serbs. Past support for Croatian groups, including the Ustaše, by some Catholic priests in the country were cited as proof of the concordat’s sinister nature, and rumors spread furiously among discontents about hidden provisions in the renewed concordat, including that Prince Paul had converted to Catholicism in secret as part of a plan to subvert the country and King Peter.

Matters were not improved by the concordat's conclusion coming only a few months after the death of Patriarch Varnava I of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Matters may have been worse if Prime Minister Stojadinović had been attempting to negotiate the concordat or having parliament vote to ratify it when the patriarch died, but as it was minor protests still broke out among Orthodox priests in Belgrade as the Yugoslav parliament ratified the treaty over the fierce objections of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The protests and the resulting arrest of priests gravely alarmed Prince Paul, and to ease tensions, two private conferences were arranged; one between the new Patriarch Gavrilo V, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, the president of the Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops of Yugoslavia, and Prince Paul, and the other between the regent, Father Korošec, and Dmitri Ljotić; to discuss the concordat and other issues of church and state.

The leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Maček, was noticeably absent from the discussions. His anti-clerical positions, including going as far as to advocate for a Croatian church separate from the Vatican, had left Maček and his party flatfooted by the government’s successful conclusion of the concordat. Milan Stojadinović was also pointedly excluded from these discussions, but it did not stop his opponents in the military from imagining the prime minister’s fingerprints behind these moves and agitating accordingly.

The Tightening Snare

In addition to the underhanded unilateralism of Milan Stojadinović’s policies, the Romanian government also seemed to take inspiration from the Yugoslav prime minister’s ambition of tying Yugoslavia to as many powers as possible in order to preserve the country’s independence.

Riding high from the success of the Bled Agreement, both Hungary and Romania sought to pursue their respective strategies further. With tensions temporarily settled between the two countries, each could look to their relationships with other neighboring countries. For Bucharest, this meant extending feelers in every direction to grant Romania the maximum diplomatic flexibility. To this end, King Carol took the wildly unexpected step of recognizing and establishing diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union. Meetings were tentatively arranged in which to discuss minority rights in Bessarabia, the passage of Soviet forces through the country in the event of war, and the return of the Romanian Treasure which had been sent to Russia for safekeeping during the Great War. Few expected Joseph Stalin or King Carol to come to an agreement on any of these issues, but neither had they anticipated the sudden desire by Romania to placate its larger neighbor. A more natural development was the renewal of the 1921 Romanian-Polish alliance, as the easing of tensions between Romania and Hungary and the corresponding decline in Bucharest’s relationship with Prague eased the way to reinstating many of the military and diplomatic conventions between Romania and Poland which had been allowed to lapse.

The fracturing of the Little Entente with the Bled Agreement encouraged Budapest to new heights of brinkmanship and saber-rattling against the post-war settlement.

While Romania was mending relationships with other countries, the Hungarians were aggressively posturing against their neighbors. Fences may have been mended with Bucharest, but with the threat of a Polish-Romanian-Hungarian bloc to fall back upon, the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy went about strengthening ties with Berlin and Rome by adding ministers to his cabinet who were known to be receptive to Fascism and to German and Italian grievances, although he also made sure to emphasize his government’s unique Hungarian character. This move was followed by another set of military exercises. The highlights were the incorporation of the nascent Royal Hungarian Air Force into operations, and demonstrations where the army stormed fortifications and conducted mock encirclements on open plains. The message was clear to Prague and Belgrade that, while the Hungarians may have set aside the issue of Transylvania for the time being, they still had designs on other lost territories in Slovakia and the Banat.

The war in Spain continued unabated, with the capital of Madrid suffering as it passed from control of the Nationalists to the Republicans and back again. The successive battles for the country’s premiere city were characterized by fierce house-to-house fighting, and even after the battle had ended, the survivors were subjected to conscription and reprisals by the winners.

The Spanish Civil War continued its bloody progress, though towards what conclusion outsiders could only guess. After losing the battle for control of the Atlantic coast of the country, Franco’s Nationalists had managed to surround a small number of Republican divisions in the northwest corner of Spain. It was a welcome prize after weeks of setbacks and recriminations, but still a much poorer one than what had been allowed to slip through the fingers of the Nationalist forces. The initial excitement over the war had worn off, and the once-impressive flood of foreign volunteers and material support into Spain had slowed to a trickle. Franco’s supporters in Germany and Italy were particularly unimpressed with the military failures of the Nationalists, and began tempering expectations that had been fanned by domestic propaganda claiming that Spain was the primary battleground in the war against Bolshevism. Besides, events elsewhere in Europe occupied their attention and promised potential returns richer than those to be found on the Iberian peninsula.

Tension Between the Victors

The dust of the “War to End All Wars” had hardly settled when the victorious Entente powers turned against one another, disagreeing on the division of spoils, the drawing of boundaries, and the maintenance of peace.

Even in the darkest days of the Great War, the Franco-British partnership had endured. But what the war couldn’t accomplish, even with the Kaiser’s armies and propagandists and the withdrawal of Russia from the war into internal revolution and civil war, the outbreak of peace did. The alliance which had triumphed against the Central Powers, may have included Italy, the United States, Japan, and a host of smaller states, but by 1919 its heart was the relationship between France and Great Britain. As soon as peace negotiations had opened, however, it had been clear that London and Paris were drifting further and further apart. While the French had wanted to prevent a resurgence of German power and militarism, British statesmen had been more worried about France’s position as the predominant military power on the European continent. The rivalry between these two great empires may have been set aside in the face of the German threat, but hundreds of years of competition and hostility were not so easily put to rest.

In the 1920’s, France had attempted, on the whole, to pursue a policy wholly out of line with British financial and political interests in Germany’s rehabilitation. To that end, Paris had forged alliances with partners in Eastern and Central Europe: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. She had even attempted to split off the Rhineland from Germany through a plebiscite and propaganda campaign, and invaded the mineral-rich Ruhr Valley in order to collect Berlin’s delinquent reparation payments. These actions had not prevented Germany from growing more assertive and radical, nor did they preserve French security. Most alarming of all to Paris, such bold moves had tended to elicit sympathy across the English Channel for the defeated Germans. Accordingly, in the 1930’s France had emphasized the other trend in her foreign policy: clinging to London out of the belief that the combination of the two powers would be able to deter German ambitions, including through war if necessary.

This policy was limiting and frustrating for Paris, forced to play the junior partner to a historical rival who was largely ambivalent to French fears. It took a fractious period of debate and Pierre Laval’s cold-eyed assessment of his country’s situation to admit what he and many other Frenchmen had long known was true: Britain would not go to war to save France. Paris needed to take the lead in developing her own security.

After years of France molding her foreign policy to that of Great Britain, Pierre Laval’s government sought to revive French leadership and capabilities in Europe, both diplomatically and militarily.

Such a revelation came too late to preserve the original French military doctrine of using a demilitarized Rhineland as a springboard for an invasion of Germany, but a compromise was sought between the static mentality embodied by the Maginot Line and the offensive spirit that French army had embraced before the slaughter of the trenches. Laval was perfectly taciturn when describing the need for France to develop an army capable of offensive operations and a foreign policy which would defend herself, but careless translations and overeager subordinates lent these two developments the ominous monikers in the English-speaking world of an “army of aggression” and “France first”. While the Anglo-Saxon powers tut-tutted Paris, France’s one-time allies to the east could not help but doubt that this latest change in French policy and doctrine would last long enough to aid them.

While the sun never set on the British Empire, that meant that London could never sleep. Constant care had to be paid to a myriad of strategic considerations around the world, from the English Channel to the Suez Canal to the Straits of Malacca.

The divide between Britain and France had accelerated over the two countries’ differing views on which countries posed the greatest threat. For France, the German enemy against which she had fought again and again for over a hundred years was the clear and present danger, whereas Britain was more concerned with preserving a globe-spanning colonial empire from the jealous imperialist powers of Italy and Japan. To that end, London announced the government’s decision to reinforce colonial holdings in East Asia, namely Hong Kong and Singapore, by transferring vessels from the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet to an expanded and consolidated Far Eastern command. The announcement, by its very publicity, was intended to chastise both Japan and France, if only temporarily. After all, the Admiralty believed that a potential war between great powers was still a distant enough possibility that there would be plenty of time to reassign ships in light of whatever crises might arise.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Nine: Another Damned Foolish Thing in the Balkans (December 2nd, 1937 to March 18th, 1938)

Yugoslavia Turns to Fascism, and the Fascist Powers

While Milan Stojadinović arranged for the military exchange, the exact details of the Wehrmacht’s mission to Yugoslavia were left up to Milan Nedić, his German counterpart, and their respective staffs.

In anticipation of the coming conflict with Bulgaria, Prime Minister Milan Stojadinović attempted to revive his strategy of tactical engagement with the great powers of Europe. With Britain sharply critical of the current leadership in Belgrade and France unwilling to intervene, it fell upon Germany to serve as the necessary counterweight to Italian influence in the kingdom. To win Berlin’s support and protection, Stojadinović had to overcome the twin challenges of Berlin’s reproachment with Italy and the hostility of the Yugoslav generals to such a move.

With regards to the first obstacle, Stojadinović primarily relied on his words. In frequent meetings with the German ambassador in Belgrade, he reiterated Yugoslavia’s valuable role as a source of raw materials for the expanding German economy, and reminded the ambassador of Italy’s failure to adhere to the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary during the Great War. He also extended an offer for a German military mission to come to Yugoslavia in order to train the Royal Yugoslav Army and foster increased ties between the two countries.

The half-hearted efforts by the French and British to win Benito Mussolini and Italy for an anti-German alliance seemed to have died an ignoble death as the Duce welcomed Adolf Hitler to Rome for an audience with King Victor Emmanuel III and a private conference to discuss the future of Austria.

The prime minister may not have entirely expected that the offer would be accepted, but Germany was strikingly receptive. While Yugoslavia held little appeal as a military ally for Berlin, Stojadinović was correct when he highlighted the economic interdependency between the two countries, and maintaining a friendly relationship with Belgrade would help to compliment the strategy of continental autarky which Germany had been prepared in anticipation of another British war-time blockade. Although closer ties between Berlin and Belgrade may have frightened Italy into making common cause with Britain and France, Adolf Hitler was more than willing to gamble that Mussolini would not turn to the squabbling British and French when there were far fewer obstacles to an accord between Italy and Germany. Preliminary talks about the status of Austria had already proved promising, but the German foreign ministry was happy to have another advantage when dealing with the Italians.

After a few weeks of working out the details, a German military mission was assembled and sent to Yugoslavia to assist with training the Royal Army with the latest tactics and technology. The mission was met with trepidation by the enlisted men and younger officers, with the recruits brought in through ZBOR and other initiatives of the reformed Yugoslav Radical Union proving more enthusiastic. Among the upper ranks, however, the idea of Germans coming to the country and training the army was incredibly alarming. Efforts to keep news of the mission’s presence in the kingdom quiet faltered, just as the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission in Spain’s true purpose had leaked out, when key generals passed on information which made its way into the international and national press. London was quick to raise alarm bells of Yugoslavia becoming a puppet of Germany, and this call was echoed by domestic opponents of the Yugoslav government.

In the face of mounting pressure, preparations were made to withdraw the mission, but General Milan Nedić, also serving as the Minister of the Army and Navy, refused to budge and he castigated his fellow generals who accused of spreading dissension within the ranks. Nedić, long desirous of an alignment with Germany, proved his loyalty and his value to Prince Paul and the government. Even the arch-civilian Stojadinović had kind words to say about the general. Although other members of the general staff refrained from letting their dispute with Nedić spill out into the open, behind closed doors some of them had revised their opinion of him from an ally of the army establishment to its opponent.

The early elections called by Prince Paul, coming so soon after the successful managing of the Ustaše and IMRO threats, cemented the Radical Union’s hold on the government, although the party was far from universally popular.

At the urging of his prime minister, Prince Paul agreed to dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections for the kingdom a year ahead of schedule. On December 3rd, Yugoslav voters went to the polls and the results were an overwhelming victory for the Radical Union party, which gained over three-hundred of the country’s 373 seats. Although the election was marred with the usual degree of corruption baked into the kingdom’s system of public ballots and the resulting pressure from employers, the vote was nonetheless seen as a strong endorsement for the government and its policy of evolving Yugoslavism. The Croatian Peasant Party, the kingdom’s chief opposition party, was still struggling to respond to the government’s successful management of the Ustaše problem and its successful conclusion of a concordat with the Catholic Church. While there were loud and prominent Serb critics of Stojadinović and his policies, the timing of the elections left them scrambling to organize and ultimately only a few candidates who were supported by or members of the Serbian Cultural Club were elected to the assembly, many of them actually as part of the Radical Union’s own electoral lists, which had not been kept completely up-to-date in light of the changes undergone by the party. In sum, Milan Stojadinović’s political instincts had served him well and he was able to cement the power of the Radical Union, and shore up his own position, while the military leadership was divided over the question of a German military mission in Yugoslavia and his civilian opposition was still disorganized.

The success of the Radical Union initially seemed to fulfill Stojadinović’s long-standing ambitions of becoming the Yugoslav Mussolini. Following the election, he worked carefully to sideline Prince Paul from important policy discussions and decisions, but his unilateral moves at home and abroad eroded his base of support.

Although no longer the sole leader of the Radical Union, the party’s success at the ballot box gave Milan Stojadinović a renewed sense of importance and power in the multipolar Yugoslav system. With his star on the rise, the prime minister started making moves to eclipse his rivals, including Prince Paul. The Radical Union’s membership rolls were swelled by ambitious Yugoslavs looking to burnish their professional credentials, and Stojadinović attempted to enforce a pledge among these new recruits whereby the men and women flocking to the party’s banner would swear loyalty to not only the kingdom and the monarchy, but also the person of the party’s leader, or vojda, Stojadinović. Members of ZBOR reported this breach of decorum to Dmitri Ljotić, who in turn passed the information onto Prince Paul, and the two men impressed upon Stojadinović to retract the pledge.

The prime minister grudgingly accepted this rebuke, but it did little to temper his ambitions. He confided to the Italian Count Galeazzo Ciano that he was willing to accept this setback to his ambitions for now in order that he was able to conserve his political capital for other projects. “After all,” he crowed, “I have no need to march on Belgrade! I am already here!”

Confirming the worst fears of many of his critics, Milan Stojadinović moved to align Yugoslavia explicitly with the revisionist powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. “France, Britain, and Romania will not protect Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia must protect herself,” the prime minister declared.

One of those projects was to make the alignment with Germany and Italy official. The two revisionist powers had already begun discussing matters of mutual interest and Stojadinović was worried that Yugoslavia might be left out of the decision-making which would decide the fate of Austria and the delineation of spheres of influence within Europe. Shamelessly, the prime minister appealed to the Italians and the Germans, promising to each that Yugoslavia would help preserve their interests against Germany’s size and Italy’s perfidy respectively. All of his wrangling, accomplished little in the way of concrete results; Belgrade was given the status of an impartial observer during some of the preliminary talks between Germany and Italy as well as a promise to be consulted in the event that such discussions proved fruitful enough to produce a full-fledged defensive pact between the two countries. Yugoslavia would share this limbo with Japan, whose diplomats were hard at work trying to discourage German cooperation with the Chinese government. Both countries joined Berlin and Rome in an anti-Soviet grouping which was more rhetorical than real.

While the pledges and promises of Mussolini and Hitler’s government bore a strong likelihood of being rendered moot by developments, just as the kingdom’s alliances with France, Czechoslovakia, and Romania had fallen apart, Stojadinović viewed his intervention as an unbridled success. Yugoslavia, he declared, would cooperate with Germany and Italy in the reordering of Europe based on true self-determination, not the shadow of it which cloaked Versailles, the victor’s peace, in the flimsiest shroud of legitimacy. Unfortunately for Stojadinović , his detractors believed just as strongly that the agreement signed between Belgrade, Berlin, and Rome was more than a scrap of paper, and this was one factor which prompted them to act.

The Bulgarian Option

The list of Yugoslav grievances against the Kingdom of Bulgaria was long and far-reaching, but it had long been thought that fears of another Europe-wide conflagration would prevent conflicts in the Balkan erupting into war.

It would later emerge from the unsealing of archival documents, that the negotiations which were conducted between Milan Stojadinović, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Count Galeazzo Ciano included a secret protocol for the reordering of central and southern Europe. In addition to agreeing to allow Germany to decide the fate of Austria with her millions of Germans, it was also decided that Germany should consider Hungary and Czechoslovakia as being within her sphere of influence and work to “maintain the peace and proper demarcation of borders” in the region. In exchange, the cosigning powers recognized Italian predominance in the Mediterranean Sea, with Albania and Greece being considered areas of vital importance to Rome’s security. Yugoslav agreement to this horse-trading was not so essential as to lead to her dealing with the great revisionist powers as an equal, as Stojadinović loudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen, but he did manage to eke out a boon for his own ambitions and those of fanatical Yugoslavists.

Bulgaria, long considered a potential German or Italian partner in their revanchist plans for Europe, was abandoned by Berlin and Rome. Belgrade, it was decided would prove a much more useful partner and so the Kingdom of Bulgaria was abandoned to the mercies of her neighbor to the west and the egotist helming the Yugoslav government.

The mild-mannered and popular ruler of Bulgaria, Tsar Boris III, was an unlikely target for the harsh rhetoric delivered by Stojadinović and his supporters, but their speeches on the floor of the National Assembly and articles in party-controlled newspapers helped to fan the flames of war.

When Milan Stojadinović appeared before the National Assembly to explain his case for war with Bulgaria, he relied on a wide range of justifications, hoping to catch as many parliamentarians in his net as possible. Citing Bulgarian support for Macedonian separatists and terrorists, the prime minister raised the specter of a Bulgarian attack on Yugoslavia conducted with the other envious powers on the kingdom’s borders. Furthermore, he described expansion to the Black Sea and incorporation of the Bulgarian Slavs as a fulfillment of the Yugoslavist ideal. The dream was within the grasp of its believers, he argued, during the brief but eventful rule of the Zveno in Sofia, but the Bulgarian Yugoslavists were thrown out by treacherous elites, Tsar Boris chief among them, who were fearful of losing their power in the great South Slav nation that was being built without them.

To the Yugoslav military, Stojadinović promised glory; to his supporters, he promised fulfillment of a dream; but to the ordinary citizens, the prime minister had to make the much more difficult case that this war against Bulgaria would be concluded quickly and that the territory and subjects gained by the kingdom would enhance rather than degrade the security and economic situation in Yugoslavia. It was a challenge that Stojadinović was well-suited to, and he was quick to marshal charts and figures produced by his loyal underlings in the finance ministry to prove that the agricultural economy of Bulgaria, once modernized and connected through a series of bold infrastructure projects, would help expand Yugoslavia’s economy and the kingdom’s hold on European markets for foodstuffs.

Although he would never have been so foolish as to admit in public, Stojadinović also believed that adding Bulgarians to the makeup of the kingdom would grant his politics a greater degree of flexibility. Bulgarians and Macedonians could replace the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, or Bosnian Muslims as one of the legs in the prime minister’s political stool, and then be replaced as he saw fit. Such a cynical approach to Yugoslav politics went against the unifying ideology of the new Radical Union party, and even his most faithful supporters would have blanched at Stojadinović’s desire to dilute their voices and political power in their own country.

The various Bulgarian rearmament programs in violation of the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and confidence in Italian and Hungarian support led to Tsar Boris III and his government responding to the Yugoslav challenge with demands of their own.

Sofia met the initial flurry of bellicose rhetoric from Belgrade with incredulity and skepticism. It was widely believed in the Bulgarian capital that Yugoslavia was riven with such internal disputes as to make war a foolhardy undertaking, particularly for a blowhard like Milan Stojadinović. Prince Paul and the kingdom’s military would undoubtedly rein the prime minister in, and, even if they did not, Bulgaria would be ready to meet the challenge from her neighbor. With the passive acquiescence of the members of the Balkan Pact, and the covert support of Germany and Italy, the Bulgarian military had made moves to rearm in defiance of the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine which had hobbled the kingdom’s military and stripped away her gains from the Balkan Wars. While still eclipsed by the Royal Yugoslav Army in size, the small frontier and impressive fortifications on the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border were believed to give the defenders ample ability to blunt any initial offensive that might be dreamed up in Belgrade, and then to respond in kind. The Bulgarian reputation for military aptitude which had earned her the moniker “the Prussian of the Balkans” was still widely held as gospel.

Although Stojadinović had overreached in many occasions, his eminently pragmatic foreign policy had one last chance to shine.

The other reason for Bulgaria’s initial confidence in the face of threatening moves by Yugoslavia came from the diplomacy with which Sofia had courted other revisionist powers. While the Germans were too distant to intervene in the Balkans directly, the Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Italian governments had worked together on various conspiracies, including the assassination of King Alexander in Paris, meant to destabilize Yugoslavia and grant each the territories which they coveted. In the event of war with Yugoslavia, Tsar Boris and his generals felt confident that Yugoslavia would have to deal with the Italians and Hungarians as well, which would divide the Yugoslav forces and render its military far weaker in local terms than the concentrated forces of the Bulgarian Army.

This deterrence seemed to unravel in a heartbeat as Stojadinović announced with nigh-tangible relish to the National Assembly and the world that Yugoslavia had signed separate pacts of nonaggression and good will with the Kingdoms of Italy and Hungary. With Hungarian efforts directed towards reclaiming territory lost to Czechoslovakia and Italy waiting for Berlin to move against Austria, neither power was interested in intervening to save a remote and hitherto unhelpful backwater kingdom like Bulgaria when less bothersome wins seemed to be just over the horizon. Frantic, last-minute appeals by Sofia to Great Britain and France, the leading powers of the League of Nations also fell on deaf ears. Besides being occupied by more pressing concerns in East Asia and the streets of Paris respectively, neither victor of the Great War felt particularly sympathetic towards the position of the Bulgarian kingdom, which had been a staunch member of the opposing Central Powers during that conflict and had sought to undermine the very European order which it was now appealing to for salvation. No one in London or Paris was willing to risk a Balkan War erupting into another World War. “Why bleed for Bulgaria?” asked one British member of parliament.

In anticipation of the coming war, Belgrade worked to raise three new infantry divisions, formed in significant part out of enthusiastic members of the White Eagles movement. Enthusiasm was in greater supply than modern weaponry, however.

With Italian and Hungary neutralized, the leaders and planners of the Royal Yugoslav Army could finalize their plans for war against Bulgaria. Three new divisions of infantry were put through a rapid training regimen. The men, a sizable minority of them eager recruits drawn from the Radical Union’s White Eagles program and from the Croatian forces which had been formed to police Croatia for Ustaše forces, boasted some prior experience of combat from street brawls or raids against separatist hideouts, but were not accorded the usual high degree of training which typically characterized the Yugoslav armed forces. This was due to considerations of speed and strategy, namely the generals wanting to marshal as many armed men as they could against entrenched Bulgarian positions, but also due to the hostility which those same generals viewed these soldiers who came from outside the usual pool of Serbian and Montenegrin recruits.

Such deficiencies in training were to be negated, the general staff argued, through the usage of modern tactics gleaned from the Spanish Civil War and instruments of war developed with foreign technical assistance. Despite such bold pronouncements, the Royal Yugoslav Army still struggled to fulfill the equipment needs of its fielded units and was reliant on its French- and Czech-designed air force since the kingdom’s indigenous designs had, as of yet, not been put into mass production. Tanks and modern bombers were similarly beyond the capabilities of Yugoslav industry to produce, leaving the army to rely on Great War-era tactics of artillery bombardment and massed infantry attacks targeting what were hopeful the weak points in enemy lines. While publicly braggadocious about their beloved Royal Yugoslav Army and its chances against the Bulgarian foe, the generals were privately worried about how the army would fare in its first true test since the end of the Great War. Worries also abounded that, should the war go badly, Stojadinović and his cronies would attempt to shift the blame onto the military’s shoulders.

As the country moved to war, Stojadinović’s statements about Bulgaria became more and more bellicose, and his detractors grew more and more nervous.

Yugoslavia’s march to war seemed to fulfill many of Stojadinović’s ambitions, and he grew bolder and bolder in challenging the authority of the military leadership and that of Prince Paul. Speeches to large crowds of supporters became commonplace and it appeared to casual observers as though the prime minister was well on his way to becoming the Yugoslav Mussolini. It was, and is, difficult to know how popular Stojadinović truly was among the common people of Yugoslavia at this time, especially given what followed this peak of his political career. Many of the cheering men and women who attended his fiery speeches about Yugoslavia’s destiny as an architect of a new Europe were reliant on the Radical Union for their livelihood, while the younger members of the White Eagles were conspicuous in their failure to show public reverence and support for their nominal leader. While Stojadinović had improved his reputation as a corrupt philanderer through successfully dealing with the kingdom’s economy as well as the problems of the Ustaše and the IMRO, most Yugoslavs were reluctant to go to war after so many years had been spent rebuilding the country after the last one.

Following the overwhelming victory of the Radical Union in December’s elections, the staunchest opponents of the prime minister pinned their hopes on the military removing Stojadinović from power before he was able to solidify his position. But a war with Bulgaria rapidly approaching meant that the generals were kept busy and fearful that such a move might lead to such weakness and internal chaos that it would invite the very war which they were dreading.

Unable to contain his ambitions, Milan Stojadinović overreached, and was removed from power by a man he had privately derided as a dilettantish nonentity.

Into this confused situation strode Prince Paul. Painfully aware that he was exercising the same powers which his autocratic cousin had used during the period of the royal dictatorship, Paul nonetheless proclaimed a state of emergency in Yugoslavia, citing the looming war with Bulgaria. Executive power could have passed to the regent in his role as the nominal head of the kingdom’s military, but Paul was content with dismissing Stojadinović from the post of prime minister, and appointing General Milan Nedić in his stead. Stojadinović was not completely removed from power, but he was demoted to the finance portfolio as part of an overall shift in the cabinet which saw the military and Ljotić’s faction of the Radical Union gain more prestigious posts at the cost of Stojadinović’s old guard of loyalists. Ethnic leaders such as Father Anton Korošec and Mehmed Spaho kept their positions as sops to the Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims since they were quick to distance themselves from the disgraced prime minister.

Prince Paul’s reputation as an Anglophile preceded him (the British king, George VI, was a member of Paul’s wedding party), and the shift of power in Belgrade away from Stojadinović and his public sympathies with the revisionist powers to the modest regent set foreign capitals abuzz. Adolf Hitler, already ill-disposed to the idea of hereditary monarchy owing to his recent and uncomfortable visit to Rome, privately fumed and expressed to his inner circle his belief that Prince Paul would renege on the commitments made by his prime minister in order to ingratiate himself to the British. In London, the regent’s power grab inspired optimism that Yugoslavia might be brought back from the brink of fascism, but the more cynical voices led by Winston Churchill proved more correct. While critical of Stojadinović’s extravagances and shiftlessness during his tenure as leader of the government, Prince Paul and his new prime minister both refused to withdraw the kingdom from the agreements which had been signed with Germany, Italy, and Hungary. The dream of a greater Yugoslavia stretching to the Black Sea was a powerful idea, especially for the prince whose Yugoslavist feelings were much stronger than those of King Alexander. Besides, the progress to war, once begun, was hard to stop without inviting Sofia to capitalize on the situation, possibly in conjunction with Budapest and Rome if Belgrade showed weakness.

Rise of the Mouvement Franciste

By the end of 1937, it was clear that the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War were failing in their crusade against the Republicans, as an increasing amount of generals, soldiers, and sympathetic civilians fled into neighboring Portugal and begged her prime minister, António de Oliveira Salazar, for protection.

By the start of 1938, the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War were in a state of disarray and retreat. The Republicans had united under a military and political vanguard of Communists supported by the Soviet Union, and so were better disciplined and better funded than Franco’s forces. Week after week brought news of another Nationalist defeat and the anti-Communists were forced to abandon much of the country except for some territory along the Portuguese border and the provisional capital of Burgos. The Nationalists faced desertions at all levels of the military, and many civilians followed the soldiers and generals in seeking refuge in neighboring Portugal, which prompted more crackdowns in the Nationalist camp to try and restore the elusive order and momentum which it had enjoyed at the start of the conflict. There were calls of alarm related to the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Spain, due to both Nationalist and Republican savagery, but aside from that of the Catholic Church, most of those voices were muted.

In response to the threat of Spain falling to Communism, far-right patriotic leagues reemerged in France, despite their being outlawed under the Blum government in 1934. Fear of Bolshevism in western Europe unsettled the already precarious French political situation.

When it came to Spain, France was the exception to that trend regarding the Spanish situation. In the wake of Paris’ own difficulties with Communists, Laval and his supporters saw similarities between the Bolshevik takeover of Spain and what had occurred in their own country. Many critics argued that, like the Nationalists, the National Bloc government had instigated the conflict, not the leftists, but in any case, the parallels were enough to drive the French government into closer cooperation with other anti-Communist forces in the country. The National Bloc quietly lessened the restrictions on many of the far-right leagues which had been banned in 1934, and some members of the government began working to incorporate them into a single ideological movement. Groups as diverse as the royalist Camelots du Roi, the veteran’s organization the Croix-de-Feu, and the Italian-funded Mouvement Franciste were brought together and marshalled to combat Communism influence in the country.

The reactivated leagues quickly escaped the control of the civilian government in Paris, as many parliamentarians were uncomfortable with the level of violence employed by their erstwhile allies and many of the leagues’ members did not respect the fat and rich politicians who thought they could use French patriotism as they saw fit. As the Communists faltered and were almost completely-driven from public life, the leagues turned their attention to government officials who they considered to be traitors and enablers of Bolshevism. As the leagues’ members converged on Paris for a demonstration, Laval’s calls for calm were ignored and his ministers sent a frantic plea to the military for salvation.

The French government’s lurch to the right through the perfectly legal methods of parliamentary action dampened the appeal of Action Française and other anti-republican groups. In spite of this marginalization, Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Française, welcomed the government formed under Marshal Pétain as a “divine surprise”.

The man who was chosen to answer the government’s call for aid was retired French field marshal Phillipe Pétain. A hero of the Great War to both the public and the troops who had served under him for his conduct at Verdun and his diffusing of the 1917 mutinies, the “Lion of Verdun” possessed the perfect combination of personal popularity, experience, and legitimacy among enough different sections of the French population to lead the government which replaced the faltering one headed by Pierre Laval. Laval, living up to his reputation as a political survivor, managed to earn a role in the new government, as did a number of other experienced ministers, but the nature of Pétain’s new government was decidedly military. A fierce critic of the “decadence” which had characterized French politics and society since the end of the Great War, Pétain’s aims went further than merely reviving the sense of national unity which France had enjoyed during the war. Along with his supporters, the marshal sought a revitalization of French society which would rejuvenate the country and prepare her for the challenges ahead.

To that end, the new government formed a new party which bore the moniker “Mouvement Franciste”, the same name as the Italian-backed French Fascist party but this new party fiercely expunged foreign sympathizers from its rank and owed more to François de La Rocque and his Parti Social Français in its ideology and its military-style organization. In order to cement the new order in France, the new government organized a hastily-organized referendum for the French people to voice whether or not they approved of the new government and the replacement of the Third Republic with a “caretaker government whose responsibility is solely to the French nation”.

The overwhelming margin of support for the new order headed by Pétain can be attributable to many factors, including a wide-ranging campaign of voter intimidation conducted by the remnants of the rapidly declining far-right leagues, distaste for the chaotic political situation in France and other aspects of the Republic, a genuine fear of an attack by France’s enemies, and a genuine hope that a new government would be able to put an end to the country’s manifold troubles. As a result of the hastily conducted referendum, Marshal Pétain was elevated to the newly-created post of President and became the official leader of a French government in which the executive possessed a greater deal of flexibility and power than any prime minister had possessed under the constitution of the Third Republic.

With Spain’s fall to Communism only a matter of time, Pétain and the new French government were now faced with the likelihood of a hostile neighbor to the south in addition to potential enemies in Germany and Italy. As Paris moved to secure France’s international position, long-standing commitments to French partners in Prague and Belgrade were written off with little notice and even less ceremony.

In light of the domestic upheaval roiling France, Paris stepped back from its international commitments to Prague and Belgrade in order to avoid being dragged into a war before she was ready (although Bucharest retained a pledge of French defense owing to Bucharest's masterful diplomacy). The loss of foreign protection left both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia more reliant on one or more of the other great powers for protection. The upheaval in France and its effects abroad led most international observers to conclude that the country would need time to consolidate, no matter what strange beast was born from the chaos, and so Paris would not be a factor in the contest for Europe for some time.

The sudden French transition to a Fascist government, which was similar to but distinct from those in Italy, Germany, and Yugoslavia, led to a flurry of new legislation and decrees in France as the new government solidified its grip on power.

While others watched on, the new government in Paris worked to transform the country from a republic built on “liberty, egality, and fraternity” to a new state based on “work, family, and fatherland”. Some initial supporters of the new government were disappointed in the measures that were taken. Royalists from Action Française were disappointed that Pétain did not move to restore the monarchy in France despite rumors (mainly spread by the group’s own newspaper and ideologues) that the new president had private monarchist leanings of his own. Others were disappointed that so many civilians, particularly from within the deposed Laval government, retained posts in what was otherwise a military-led regime. Lastly, despite his reputation and the authority that the new French constitution gave him, it was a matter of fierce and sincere debate over to what degree President Pétain was truly in control of the new France given his advanced age and the ambitious men who surrounded the venerable old war hero and pushed their own ideas, grudges, and schemes on him.

For the average Frenchman, these already arcane debates were further obfuscated by an abrupt shuttering of many of the country’s newspapers. For the time being, the population had to content itself with the reappearance of order in France, even if the new government seemed wildly out of step with the Republic which it had buried and replaced.

Asia on the Brink of War

To the surprise of all, Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of China’s central government, acceded to Japanese demands following the Marco Polo Bridge incident. To critics at home and abroad, of which there were many, Chiang explained that China’s concessions were necessary to buy time to prepare for the coming conflict with Japan.

On February 4th, 1938, skirmishes broke out at the historic Marco Polo Bridge between Japanese troops stationed in China and Chinese forces loyal to the Kuomintang government for reasons still unknown to historians. The Chinese soldiers repelled an initial advance on the bridge, but were clearly unprepared for a sustained battle so a ceasefire was negotiated with the Japanese commander. The incident aroused outrage in both China and Japan, and it appeared as though war would break out after Tokyo sent a list of demands to Nanking. However, Chinese Chairman Chiang Kai-Shek surprised even his closest advisors and directed his government to accept blame for the incident and issue an apology to the Japanese. Chiang’s one-time rival and fellow Kuomintang stalwart, Wang Jingwei was sent to Tokyo to negotiate the rest of the Japanese demands.

Following the loss of Manchuria to Japanese intrigue in 1932, the loss of more of China’s rich industrial north to Japanese control, as well as Beijing, the historic capital of the country, was a blow to Chiang’s prestige. However, it also removed a competing power center and enabled the Generalissimo to concentrate more authority in the southern capital, Nanking, and in his own person.

The agreement which Wang brought back from Tokyo was viewed as a humiliating document by many Chinese nationalists. The final agreement called for the surrender of Chinese territory including the imperial capital of Beijing and the important treaty port of Tianjin to a Japanese administration in order to “rid the region of Communist influence”, with only the vaguest of promises that the territory would be returned to China following a plebiscite or further negotiations with Nanking. While devastating to his prestige, Chiang could at least content himself with three facts related to this latest “unequal treaty” foisted upon China. First, he believed that caving into the Japanese at this time had bought China the time necessary to complete the German-directed modernization of the National Revolutionary Army. Second, the negotiations had pointedly excluded the Japanese client states of Manchuria and Mengjiang and the issue of recognizing the breakaway states had not even been brought up, denying legitimacy to the governments operating in those territories. Finally, Chiang believed that he had a ready scapegoat to blame in Wang Jingwei since the former premier, and Chiang’s frequent rival within the Kuomintang, had been selected to negotiate with Tokyo on the basis of his personal history with Japan and his known preference for reconciliation over conflict with Japan.

Despite his efforts to forestall war, Chiang’s surrender only whetted the appetite of the Japanese empire. The failure of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident to spark a war only delayed Tokyo’s timetable.

Despite Nanking meeting nearly all of Tokyo’s demands, the officers in the Japanese military were not satisfied with increasingly their empire’s already considerable influence in China. Preparations continued for war, although a different casus belli would need to be found. Chiang had bought his country some time to prepare for the coming storm by preparing fortifications, evacuating civilians, and training and expanding the military, but the question that gnawed at him and his supporters was whether or not it would be enough.

There was a large degree of sympathy for the Chinese government abroad, from countries as diverse as the United States to Germany, whose military mission under Alexander von Falkenhausen was hard at work training Chiang’s army. Yet, each were preoccupied with matters at home or closer to home, and so China and Chiang were left with a reservoir of good will and kind words, but nothing concrete.

Britain Prepares for War

Japanese moves in China were alarming enough, but the rise of a military government in Paris turned London’s attention back to Europe, and efforts were taken to shore up British bases and other possessions in the Mediterranean Sea.

In light of the sudden change in the situation on the continent, Great Britain appeared to give up hope on the preservation of European peace. London could not be sure where the danger would originate, so it worked to cover its bases. Coming on the heels of its reinforcement of British holdings in East Asia, the British conducted similar measures to shore up the vital imperial bases around the Mediterranean. To his followers, Mussolini had denounced Great Britain as Italy’s jailer in the Mediterranean Sea and Malta, Gibraltar, and the Suez Canal as the bars of that prison. Now, London was strengthening that prison in anticipation of an Italian attempt at a breakout.

The British Empire had held together through the sound and fury of the Great War and the wars with Napoleon, but now it faced the daunting prospect of another war, or multiple wars, against envious and rapacious rivals without any allies to share the burden. The greatest fear of the British ruling class for over a hundred years, that of a Europe united against them, seemed frighteningly likely. There were still plenty of lines cutting across Italian, German, and French interests which could prevent their combination against the British Isles, but it was still a sobering thought in Whitehall that Britain’s greatest advocate among the other European powers might in fact be Germany under Adolf Hitler. On one hand, it was fervently hoped that these fiercely nationalistic regimes would turn against one another and leave Great Britain alone, but there was also a significant section of British public opinion and leadership, Winston Churchill chief among them, which passionately argued that these changes had occurred because of London had been too timid and unwilling to intervene in order to preserve liberal democratic governance in Europe.

Across Europe, liberal democracy was in retreat as strong governments capable of weathering the coming storm took power in capitals from Paris to Athens.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Ten: The Unexpected War (March 18th, 1938 to June 25th, 1938)

The Enemy Within

While the kingdom was still preparing for a war with Bulgaria, a sudden revolt by elements in the army threatened to destroy Yugoslavia.

The generals and politicians who had been preparing and advocating for Yugoslavia to go to war were almost all caught flat-footed by the conflict which did break out. On April 15th, 1938, Yugoslavia found herself in a civil war. On one side were the forces loyal to Prince Paul, the government of Milan Nedić, and the Yugoslavist ideology. On the other were Serb discontents led by a clique of military officers, who were supported by British intelligence operatives. In an attempt to earn public support and legitimacy for their coup attempt, the generals announced the elevation of King Peter II to the throne, despite his tender age of fourteen, over temporarily commandeered radio stations.

The Tripartite Pact was the final straw for opponents of Yugoslavia’s new direction within the kingdom and abroad.

The initial stage of the coup saw massive demonstrations break out in Belgrade and other large cities with large Serb populations. The character of the protests against the Tripartite Pact was not wholly uniform; elements of Serb nationalism and Orthodox Christianity merged with democratic slogans and appearances of members from the banned Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The crowds which assembled were initially quite sizable, but as they were met by police and counterdemonstrators organized by the Radical Union’s party apparatus, many of the fair-weather demonstrators melted away. A march on the National Assembly in Belgrade to remove the regency and the Nedić government, led by a few prominent politicians and generals with memberships in the Serb Cultural Club devolved into chaos as members of the White Eagles engaged in fist fights with the marchers. The situation devolved into chaos a few short blocks from the Yugoslav parliament as the abortive “March on Belgrade" failed to accomplish what its Italian or French counterparts had.

Past changes of loyalty by the armed forces in the past had led to coups in Serbia, most notably the death of the last Serbian king of the Obrenović dynasty. King Alexander had never fully trusted his officers, remembering how they had disregarded their oath of loyalty and slain their past ruler in his bedchambers, and he had turned against the Black Hand clique which had helped bring the House of Karađorđević into power. This distrust had been passed onto Prince Paul, and the limited military presence in the royal palace helped blunt the coup's penetration of the royal household, though many royal guardsmen went over to the rebels.

Interestingly enough, advance warning of the coup had been provided by German intelligence. A female asset of the Abwehr had ensnared a Yugoslav intelligence officer, Duško Popov, while trying to turn him into a German double-agent and had discovered his true allegiance was to the British MI6. This information had notgone ignored by the Yugoslav Military Intelligence Agency, but instead was seized upon as a pretext for accelerating the coup by the agents and officers who were already complicit in planning the putsch.

The Yugoslavian Confederation, as the rebel government proclaimed itself, promised a more decentralized form of government in order to try and win support outside of Serbia, but neither its supporters nor its detractors believed that the end result would be anything less than Serb domination of the country.

With the plotters unable to marshal public support and overthrow the government in one fell swoop, the traitor generals and their supporters, led by General and head of the Royal Yugoslav Air Force Dušan Simović, retreated to Moravia and Macedonia to meet up with the army. Declaring a new government in Skopje nominally headed by King Peter but populated by various military officers, the putschists declared their intention to form a “democratic government in line with the prevailing sentiments of the Yugoslav people” whose first act was the repudiation of the Tripartite Pact and the pursuit of closer ties with Great Britain and “other freedom-loving peoples”.

Such a proclamation boldly proclaiming the coup’s international backer was muted by the measured response from London, in which the British government expressed sympathy for the plotters’ aims and hopes for a peaceful outcome, but withheld outright diplomatic recognition for the time being. Even so, King Peter was lionized in the British press as an anti-fascist hero to be emulated by the country’s young boys.

While the rebels lacked support outside of the military and Belgrade retained control of much of the country, forces loyal to the government were scattered and disorganized due to the speed with which the civil war broke out.

The battle lines which were initially drawn were partially along ethnic lines. The coup plotters, unable to seize control of Belgrade and the mechanisms of government, rallied the bulk of the army to the banner of King Peter. The soldiers massed along the Bulgarian border and engaged in policing the hardcore IMRO holdouts came over to the putsch almost immediately. The Morava and Vardar banovinas were the stronghold of the British-backed rebel government, along with a section of the Zeta banovina, while the rest of the country remained loyal to the Belgrade government.

The widespread betrayal of the senior officers in the Royal Yugoslav Army came as a horrible shock, but the coming years of conflict would see new faces rise to prominence in their stead.

The plotters were able to convince the majority of the army to come over to their side, owing to its strong Serb character and the personal loyalty that many of the men felt for their commanding officers. The Belgrade government, on th eother hand, was able to maintain the loyalty of the devoted recruits from the White Eagles and the Croatian brigades, but they were sharply outnumbered. The Royal Yugoslav Airforce, which had been the pet project of Dušan Simović before the civil war, went overwhelmingly for the putschists, while the navy, populated as it was by Slovenes and Croats, remained loyal to Belgrade, although its role in the conflict was minimal.

The disparities between Prince Paul’s loyalists and the rebels swearing fealty to King Peter were stark. In this land of passions and feuds, nothing was divided evenly.

While the Skopje government possessed the bulk of the kingdom’s soldiers and equipment owing to the build-up on the Bulgarian border, Prince Paul and his supporters retained nearly all of Yugoslavia’s industrial base, which is part of why the failure of Belgrade and Serbia more broadly to support the coup was a harsh blow to the rebels. In the short term, the advantage belonged to the military clique, but the rebel forces were largely unable to resupply and were reliant on the small number of weapons which they could capture or which passed to them overland through Romania or Greece.

Military considerations and a shifting political landscape saw increased efforts to tie together the Kingdom of Yugoslavia not just ideologically but economically as well.

Many of the politicians and other civilian figures who went over to the rebels’ side were members of the Serbian Cultural Club or were sympathetic to its aims, including some former government ministers. One voice was that of Stevan Moljević, a cultural club member and ardent supporter of closer ties between Yugoslavia and Great Britain. His confidential memorandum delivered to the generals behind the coup called for a so-called “homogenous Serbia” within the new Yugoslavia which would see the expulsion of other ethnic groups from two-thirds of the country in order to cement Serb dominance of the kingdom.

Despite such ideological bedfellows, the putschists made some token efforts at appealing to groups beyond the Serb Cultural Club and the military, but to little result. Simović had plotted several coups throughout the 1930’s, and had ample time to draw up his preferred government. As such, he offered the post of deputy prime minister to Vladko Maček, but even in opposition the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party refused to surrender his principles and the offer was hastily rescinded after Maček demanded as the price of his support that the new government establish a semi-autonomous Croatian banovina and pursue a neutral foreign policy separate from British influence. Other ethnic leaders also rallied to the government’s side to protect the fragile gains won from the reformed Radical Union party.

The absence of a great deal Serb ethnic chauvinists in the National Assembly allowed for the Radical Union to push through a radical reorganizing of the kingdom along Yugoslavist lines. A program for an integrated rail system which would bind the non-Serb populations in the west to the industry of Serbia passed whereas it had previously been stymied by old guard reluctance to fund projects and advance economies in non-Serb territories except out of absolute necessity. The role of many Serb businesses in financing and supporting the military revolt also provided the impetus for a reorganizing of the kingdom’s economy to take more inspiration from the dynamic companies operating out of Slovenia. An expansion of the scope and responsibilities of these Slovene industrial concerns would provide valuable goods for trade and for war.

The Anschluss of Austria

On April 20th, 1938, the German Führer, Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday was marked by the unification of his Austrian homeland with his beloved German Reich.

While Britain and France still paid lip service to the idea of preserving the independence of Austria under the authoritarian government of Kurt Schuschnigg, the deciding factor in the country’s fate had long been Italy. With Rome accepting Berlin’s predominance in Austria as part of the Tripartite Pact, the last hurdle to the reunification of the two German states was removed.

Since before the Great War, Austria had been caught up in the excitement of German nationalism, but it was only with the end of the Hapsburg Empire that it became possible to truly contemplate the joining of Austrian Germans into a single state with their kinsmen. Inspired by the high ideals of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the new government which emerged from the war proclaimed itself the Republic of German-Austria and sought to unite with its fellow German republic on the basis of self-determination of peoples. The idea that Germany could benefit in any way from her loss in the war was anathema to the victorious powers and they explicitly forbade the union of Austria with Germany, leaving the rump Austrian state to struggle to survive and find a new identity for itself and its people.

Efforts at constructing a Catholic identity for Austria separate from that of the more northern Germans floundered in the face of Germany’s resurgence following the National Socialist takeover in 1933. Economically, politically, and otherwise the Germans under Berlin’s rule appeared to be leagues ahead of their beleaguered counterparts in Austria. The growth of an Austrian National Socialist party threatened the rule of the Fatherland Front under the leadership of Engelbert Dollfuss and, after he was assassinated by National Socialists, Schuschnigg. Increasingly authoritarian measures and voter fraud were used to attempt to shore up support for the Austrian government, but the popularity of the National Socialists, and, more importantly, union with Germany was growing in Austria. By 1938, it was impossible to deny the popular mood any longer.

The union of Austria with Germany, achieved without war and with cheering crowds, was the boldest challenge to the post-war order that Europe had yet seen. It gave Yugoslavia a new powerful neighbor to contend with, but the full repercussions of the Anschluss on the European balance of power would only begin to be deeply considered by Belgrade once the coup attempt, still less than a week old at that point, was defeated.

The Course of the War

In desperation, Belgrade abandoned the strategic distance which had characterized Stojadinović’s foreign policy and threw the kingdom on the mercy of German goodwill, but to no avail.

Faced with an armed uprising sparked by British machinations, Prime Minister Nedić sent a hasty call to Berlin for aid, even offering to conclude a full military alliance with Germany in order to preserve Yugoslavia. To the chagrin of the old general and many others in Belgrade, this request, based on the Tripartite Pact which had inspired the coup, was ignored. No material or men came to the aid of Belgrade during the entire conflict from Germany, nor from the other great powers. The lack of corresponding British support for the putschists was a small consolation. The experience of the Spanish Civil War appeared to highlight the failure of foreign intervention in deciding foreign power struggles, and Berlin, busy with the union with Austria, was unwilling to engage in war with Britain over such a negligible prize as Yugoslavia.

The failure of the Germans and Italians to abide by the terms of the Tripartite Pact soured some in the Yugoslav government of the prospect of aligning with the revisionist powers, but the bulk of the kingdom’s fury and consternation was reserved for Britain. Prince Paul, personally sympathetic to British history, culture, and personages, found himself under attack by men he had long considered friends. London newspapers abounded with salacious rumors about the regent’s schemes for dividing Europe up with Hitler and Mussolini and claims that he had attempted to imprison his cousin in a Shakespearean plot to seize the throne for himself. Personal appeals to George VI, who had been the best man at Paul’s wedding, went unanswered until the end of the civil war, and by then, Prince Paul was in no mood for reconciliation with his once-beloved England.

Out of deference to the kingdom’s diverse population, and the need for talented men to fill vacated posts, Milutin Nedić promoted the Croat General Mihajlo Lukić to the post of Quartermaster General. Following the war, he would be elevated to the rank of Field Marshal in an emotional ceremony.

Despite the rebels’ massive advantage of men, equipment, and planes, the forces trying to unseat the Belgrade government were hindered by the top-heavy command structure imposed by the putschists. With the young King Peter serving merely as a figurehead, real decisions were made by Dušan Simović in his role as self-appointed prime minister and by the other officers who had organized the coup d’état, but the sheer number of experienced officers complicated the rebel war effort as each man brought with him his ego and a body of troops loyal primarily to him. In a case of too many generals and not enough soldiers, command in the rebel army was divided between, complicated and made redundant by a dizzying chain of command which more resembled a briar patch. Conflicts arising from miscommunication and bruised egos caused the rebels to refrain from launching any bold moves until over a week into the war, when the push for Belgrade finally began.

The forces which had stayed loyal to the government in Belgrade, by contrast, felt the sting of a hollowed-out officer corps. Many members of the general staff had defected to the rebels, but this left the formidable Nedić brothers in full control of a Yugoslav military devoid of any real opposition. While Milan managed the civilian side of the war in conjunction with Prince Paul, his brother Milutin had total command of the Royal Yugoslav Army and was able to marshal the disjointed force of loyalists to execute bold strikes in the opening days of the conflict.

Out of fear of a Bulgarian attack when the country was most vulnerable, and a desire for King Peter’s safety, Prince Paul urged his premier field marshal to conclude the war as quickly as possible. To that end, Nedić first aimed to cut off the rebel forces from sea to hinder the British or any other hostile power from aiding the putschists.

Absent overseas support, it was believed that the rebel army's would prove much easier to subdue.

Once the rebels were cut off from the Adriatic Sea, the loyalist forces under the command of Simović's former classmate, General Petar Kosic, began making small probing attacks against weaker rebel positions. Although time was on Belgrade’s side, nobody wanted a drawn-out war for fears that it would see the dissolution of the kingdom or the rise of more radical elements, as had happened in Spain. Minimizing civilian suffering was a secondary aim of the loyalist forces, whereas the rebels, operating in the hinterlands of Yugoslav Macedonia were less judicious in their treatment of the locals.

Some initial pushes by the rebels drove Belgrade's forces back, until they launched a spirited defense of the capital meant to blunt the rebel advance and tie up enemy divisions while some detachments of loyalist infantry advanced on the relatively lightly-defended rebel capital of Skopje. Without the support of the region’s wider population, it was held that capturing the predominant cities under the rebel banner would suffice to end the conflict; there was little chance of the leaders of the putsch finding refuge among the suspicious Macedonian peasants.

Although it stretched the capabilities of his soldiers to the limits, Milutin Nedić was able to wield his motley force to bring a quick end to a tragic war.

The fall of Skopje, followed shortly thereafter by the last rebel holdout of Leskovac, on the Bulgarian border brought an end to the war. Some scholars and the Yugoslav government at the time alleged that members of the conspiracy were attempting to contact the Bulgarian government and convince Sofia to launch a preemptive attack on Yugoslavia, but nothing concrete has been proven. In any case, the end of the war should have been a cause for celebration: the Yugoslav state had endured a revolt from its most privileged and revered institution and it had survived. But the joy of victory was marred by the tragedy of loss.

The discovery of King Peter’s body in the aftermath of a battle outside of the rebels’ provisional capital in Skopje sent shockwaves throughout Yugoslavia, and beyond. The British initially amplified the story that King Peter had been specially targeted for death by Belgrade’s forces and bravely fought several assailants who had broken through rebel lines before succumbing to his injuries. The story which emerged from eyewitness accounts from captured soldiers painted a different picture, however. Seeking to shore up the morale of their retreating soldiers, the generals who had organized the coup had arranged for King Peter to visit the frontlines despite the risk to his safety. In the fighting to take Skopje, a stray artillery shell hit the royal convoy, killing the young king. Less than four years after the assassination of Alexander in Paris, Yugoslavia had lost another king to a violent death. Peter had ruled a small fraction of his kingdom for scarcely more than two months.

In the 1970’s, a painting depicting the fictional event of Prince Paul cradling the dead body of his cousin and king was withheld from the public for being offensive to public sensibilities, but its powerful dramatization, echoing Michelangelo’s Pietà, well captured the despair that the prince felt. A period of mourning was instituted, compounded by the loss of Alexander’s other children, the ten-year-old Prince Tomislav and the eight-year-old Prince Andrew, who were spirited away along with Dušan Simović by British intelligence before the end of the war. The royal situation in Yugoslavia was turned completely on its head, and the regency continued out of inertia as Prince Paul and the rest of the government and royal family wrestled with the question of what came next.

Although much less devastating than the conflict which was wrapping up in Spain, the Yugoslav Civil War touched the lives of every family who lost a son, brother, or husband to the fighting.

Unlike the situation in Spain, the civil war in Yugoslavia was short, and was primarily a military affair rather than the totalizing conflict which had rent Spanish society apart. Nonetheless, it still left deep scars on the Yugoslav psyche. Over thirty-thousand men were dead on the battlefields while dozens more were tried and found guilty of treason. The power of the country’s Serb elite was diminished, damned by the enthusiasm with which they embraced the coup against Prince Paul. New efforts were made to lift Croats, Slovenes, and loyal Serbs into the positions which traitor industrialists, politicians, and generals had once held. The uprising chastened the Serb chauvinism which had long been the deciding factor in Yugoslav politics, and it also helped to bind the other ethnicities of the kingdom more closely to Prince Paul and the Radical Union, with the regent and the party being seen as their protectors against the wild schemes of the most fanatical members of the Serb Cultural Club. Yugoslavism became not merely a project for the intellectual and political classes, but a matter of national survival. Accordingly, Dmitri Ljotić’s faction within the Radical Union began to increase in size and influence with the neutralization or death of the most strident of his military critics, seeing the rabble-rousing politician move from the Transportation Ministry to the influential post of Minister of Education for the kingdom.

International Reactions

While unsuccessful at reversing the advance of revisionism on the European continent, the civil war in Yugoslavia signified that Britain was unwilling to abandon the continent without a fight.

While the signing of the Tripartite Pact was responsible for the outbreak of the war, it also helped to preserve Yugoslavia from the predations of Italy and Hungary, as both Rome and Budapest were unwilling to risk German ire by taking advantage of Belgrade’s internal issues. While the other revisionist powers were still seeking to earn German support for their territorial ambitions, other countries saw Berlin’s failure to intervene on behalf of Prince Paul’s government as a sign that Germany could be deterred by the threat of action by the western powers. To that end, both the Czechoslovak and Romanian governments extended feelers to Britain and France to discuss measures that could be taken to deter further German expansion. It was hoped that the union of Austria and Germany would sate Berlin’s appetite, at least temporarily, but, if not, defenses had to be prepared. Despite the radical upheaval in French politics, it was still believed that the new right-wing government in France would oppose German expansion for reasons of national interest if nothing else.

Possessed by a sense of either duty or delusion, the Polish government styled itself as a new great power and a leader of Eastern Europe, notwithstanding the territorial conflicts Poland had with most of her neighbors.

In Poland, by contrast, the evident weakness of the Tripartite Pact as a military agreement provided the impetus for Poland to chart an independent course in foreign policy. Rather then bending to Berlin or Moscow, or relying on the ephemeral goodwill of London or Paris, the Polish government announced its intention to form a new international grouping of European states on the basis of Józef Piłsudski's idea of the shared culture and security needs of the countries caught between the German eagle and the Soviet bear. This Intermarium alliance attracted some interest from Bucharest and in the capitals of the Baltic countries, but it was unclear how effective Polish unilateralism would be at securing the young country’s borders.

In Britain, the failure of the military plotters to overthrow the Radical Union government was seen as regrettable, to the point that one of His Majesty’s Joint Under-Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Cadogan was inspired to write in his diary, “Yugoslavs seem to have sold their souls to the Devil. All these Balkan peoples are trash.” For Winston Churchill’s coterie of politicians, officers, and other notables, however, the speed and size of the revolt which Section-D of MI6 had helped to orchestrate seemed to point to a strategy capable of reversing the European drift towards Berlin and revisionism which required few British resources and fewer British lives. In the coming months, as Churchill’s profile rose on the strength of his strident opposition to Germany, this group of “Churchill’s irregulars” would find themselves working more and more to subvert revisionist powers on the continent. The loss of young King Peter as a symbol of resistance was unfortunate, but the deceased teenager’s brothers were kept under the care of the British government first in Egypt before being taken to London. Whitehall’s explanation was that the Belgrade government could not, and would not, guarantee the safety of the true heirs to throne, citing the story from Skopje that Belgrade’s faces killed Peter intentionally. While the young royals were kept comfortable as “guests” of the British royal family, few held any illusion that Tomislav and Alexander were not going to be used as bargaining chips in future dealings with Prince Paul and the Belgrade government.

The internal disruption in Yugoslavia gave new life to Bulgarian hopes that their neighbor to the west would pose no further threat to Bulgaria.

The situation in the Balkans had not been settled by the conclusion of the Yugoslav Civil War. Plans for war with Bulgaria had been damaged beyond recognition by the widespread betrayal of all levels of the Royal Yugoslav Army. It was possible to pull back from the brink before war between the two kingdoms became unavoidable, but it was possible that this was the last best chance at uniting the South Slavic people in one country. There was also the matter of IMRO to consider. During the civil war, the putschists had been hindered by the hostility of their territory’s Macedonian population which, led by the more cooperative elements of the IMRO, had engaged in numerous small acts of sabotage and double-dealing which ensured that the rebel forces were unable to fully pacify the banovinas under Skopje’s nominal control.

Prince Paul and Milan Nedić were surrounded by clamoring voices, but they had to make a decision whether to proceed with war against Bulgaria despite the army’s, and the country’s, exhaustion.

(That is where you, dear readers, come in. Like Belgrade, I am torn on whether to cancel the justification of war on Bulgaria or to try and eke out a victory against the now-superior Bulgarian forces. I would be interested to hear your thoughts, whether they be from a political, military, or metagaming view.)

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Eleven: A Cacophony of War (June 25th, 1938 to December 1st, 1938)

The Last Days of Peace

After nearly two decades of subjugation, Hungary was more than willing to provide Germany with a strategically placed partner in exchange for a hand in the redrawing of Europe’s borders.

As the rest of the continent help its breath, two more of Europe’s disgruntled powers threw off the shackles that had bound them since the Great War. For Hungary, the renunciation of the much-hated Treaty of Trianon and joining as a junior partner in a German-led military alliance at the end of June 1938 was almost perfunctory. For years, Hungary had agitated against and skirted the restrictions placed on her military by Trianon. The wedge between Romania and the other members of the Little Entente had helped Hungarian diplomats remove the most onerous restrictions, but the formal denouncement of the post-war settlement by Miklós Horthy on June 30th, 1938 was still greeted with euphoria by his countrymen, even eclipsing the state-sponsored celebrations that had been arranged following the signing of the military pact with Germany the day before.

While Berlin had previously been content to keep Hungary hungry for more praise and support, developments elsewhere had accelerated the German timetable for war and an ally was sought in order to impose a new vision on Europe. Despite Hungary’s small size and untested army, Budapest was eager to fulfill the role and immediately began lobbying Germany for support against Czechoslovakia and Romania, much to Bucharest’s chagrin.

Bulgaria, another of the Great War’s losers also was looking to right the wrongs of an “unjust” peace settlement. Yugoslav diplomacy may have left Sofia isolated for the time being, but the unwillingness of Belgrade’s Tripartite Pact partners to intervene on behalf of Prince Paul’s regime made it seem as though that isolation ran both ways. The violent rhetoric and extensive propaganda campaign in Yugoslavia had been matched by the government in the eastern Slavic kingdom, and the Buglarian army was ready to put the upstarts in Belgrade in their place and seize Yugoslav Macedonia as the first step towards rebuilding Bulgaria’s power and prestige in Europe.

Once the “Prussia of the Balkans”, Bulgaria retained a high degree of military culture and skill even after decades of peace.

The sudden betrayal of the Royal Yugoslav Army’s leadership had been a stroke of luck for Tsar Boris and his forces. Years of work expanding the Yugoslav military had been undone in a single act of betrayal, just as Sofia’s shirking of the military restrictions put on Bulgaria by the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine was bearing fruit. The Bulgarian army in late 1938 was roughly fifty percent larger than the Royal Yugoslav Army in terms of manpower and fielded divisions, and the industrial gap between the two kingdoms, while still in Belgrade’s favor, had narrowed sharply. The initial Yugoslav plans for a breakthrough of Bulgarian lines aided by artillery and massed infantry seemed utterly foolish in light of the changed strategic situation. With this in mind, feelers were put out to Sofia to see if there was some way to reduce tensions between the two kingdoms.

But just as much of Belgrade’s political and military leaders had worked themselves up into a frenzy before the outbreak of civil war, now Sofia was abuzz with excitement at the prospect of war with Yugoslavia. With the other powers of Europe preoccupied with developments elsewhere in Europe, there was no one willing to intervene to mediate and prevent another Balkan War. Prince Paul’s diplomatic mission, under the leadership of foreign minister Ivo Andrić, was roundly rebuffed by Sofia. Belgrade had made its bed and now it was going to have to lie in it.

Following the advice of the German military mission in the kingdom, Yugoslavia enacted a system of reserves which would allow for a larger pool of men with basic military training, especially among her non-Serb constituents.

As stated earlier, the civil war had hollowed out the backbone of the Royal Yugoslav Army: its Serb officers and their loyal followers. With war with Bulgaria on the horizon, Belgrade scrambled to make up for the deficits in manpower which suddenly afflicted the kingdom. The pressures of war and the lack of fighting near Yugoslavia’s industrial centers meant that the kingdom was producing a healthy surplus of rifles and artillery pieces, although airplanes were less forthcoming. Unfortunately, there were not enough men to wield them in the ranks of the army which had survived the struggle against the British-backed coup.

Well aware of the threat from the emboldened Bulgarians and Hungarians, National Assembly began a fierce and contentious debate following the surrender of rebel forces, the end result of which was to transform the Royal Yugoslav Army from a volunteer force to one in which all men of military age in the kingdom would have to register for conscription, out of which a fraction would serve. The old guard of officers had long defended the policy of keeping the army’s ranks full of volunteers. The argument went that the kingdom could ill-afford to be defended by men forced to bear arms for a kingdom, an idea, that they did not believe in. Unspoken was the assumption that the volunteers would mostly come from the loyal Serb and Montenegrin quarters of the country, which would help maintain the dominance of the existing leadership. The civil war, and the service of the brave Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Bosniak Muslims who rallied to Belgrade’s defense helped to break that log jam and that summer saw the first registration of young men outside of the kingdom’s Serb heartland.

The Sudeten Crisis

The dream of a united, Pan-German state had a long history, but it was under the National Socialist government that the concept was reinvigorated with Berlin seeking to reclaim German people and land across Europe.

What attention the escalating conflict between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria had attracted was soon eclipsed by a much greater threat to European peace. The implosion of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires had left Germans trapped in foreign countries all over Europe. With Austria incorporated into the German Reich, Berlin now looked to the issue of the Germans living in the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia. Despite Prague’s fiercest efforts, the population of the Sudetenland which marked the Czech border with Germany was still predominantly German in character, just as it had been when it had been a part of the Hapsburg Empire and when its citizens had attempted to join the Republic of German-Austria after the war.

Moving quickly while the country’s population was still in rapture over the peaceful reunification with Austria, Berlin began agitating for Prague to cede the Sudetenland. With each side hoping to avoid war, at least until further preparations were made, arrangements were made for a conference to be held in Munich. While no official Czech representative joined those of the four great powers which were present at the conference, Prague still had hope that, after the conclusion of formal guarantees of Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity by Great Britain and Romania, that Germany would be suitably discouraged from using force to alter the map of Europe. For all of the bellicose rhetoric emerging from the National Socialist government in Berlin, Germany had not waged war in more than fifteen years.

While German diplomats, led by the Führer Adolf Hitler himself, used the familiar arguments of self-determination, their British and French opponents argued on the basis of strategic and economic considerations. Attempts at compromise through a greater degree of political and cultural autonomy for the Sudetenlanders, similar to what Yugoslavia had granted her Slovenian subjects, were rejected. While the Germans wanted nothing less than territorial readjustment, the solution of increased autonomy was also viewed frostily by Prague, under the belief that granting concessions to the country’s German population would lead to similar demands by Czechoslovakia’s sizable Slovak and Hungarian minorities. In a country which was barely more than fifty percent Czech, such moves could lead to a civil war such as that which occurred in Yugoslavia.

The four great powers of Europe were represented at the Munich Conference which sought to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region. Prague was not invited.

Although Benito Mussolini attempted to play the part of an “honest broker”, the Italian leader was unable to create an agreement which all parties would sign off on. Surprisingly, it was not the British, but the French who proved the most ardent defenders of Czechoslovakia’s interests. Although Paris had formally renounced formal diplomatic obligations to Prague, the new government under President Phillipe Pétain believed that it was time to take a firm line against Germany. Even if the country was not entirely ready for war, it was held that the Maginot Line of fortifications would allow for French mobilization to meet the German threat. Britain on the other hand, preferred to use intelligence operations and continental allies to deter German revanchism rather than risk an outright war. While Mussolini supported the proposal, along with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, he privately kept backchannels open with the French delegation in order to see what concessions Italy could gain from a war between the two other continental powers.

The period leading up to the Great War was characterized by a series of rigid alliances, whereas the interwar period had seen few permanent alliances form as powers freely maneuvered to try and gain the advantage. The war between France and Germany would solidify coalitions, some of which had never been intended to be permanent.

French intransigence was met with fury by the German government, which signaled its intentions to go to war with Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland. Publicly, the British government lamented the failure of the Munich Conference to achieve a peaceable outcome, but behind closed doors efforts were underway to provide France with support, both material and moral, against Germany. In Prague, the Czech government was frankly bewildered by the dizzying whirlwind of developments which had occurred within just a few short hours in Munich. To face the German threat, the alliance with France was exhumed and military exchanges between the French and Czech general staffs were hastily arranged.

Twelve hours after the world knew about the failure of the Munich Conference, Germany declared war on Czechoslovakia. The general peace crafted at Versailles had not lasted twenty years.

The Second Sino-Japanese War

While Europe was preoccupied with the unfolding cataclysm, the Japanese Empire began a war which matched the Russo-Japanese War in its boldness.

Chiang Kai-Shek’s concessions to the Japanese had bought China several months of time with which to prepare for the war which Tokyo was determined to wage. Soldiers were called up, coastal cities were evacuated of civilians, officials, and industry, and defenses were prepared in their place. Still, it was uncertain whether this would be enough to withstand the tide of the Japanese military. While China could boast nearly inexhaustible reserves of manpower, Japan’s forces were far more experienced, dependable, and better armed. As the Japanese forces massed at the new border between free and occupied China began to move south from Beijing to assault Chinese positions, the momentum seemed to be on the side of Japan, whose planes and ships commanded virtually uncontested control over China’s skies and seas.

One measure of relief came when the Communist forces under Mao Zedong agreed to halt their struggle with the Nanking government and form a united front to expel the Japanese invaders from the Asian continent. Another boon came with the acceptance of both Chinese governments, the Kuomintang and the Communists, into an alliance with the Soviet Union and its client states, although it would take precious months for Moscow to shift forces to the east and away from Europe. It became all the more imperative for the Chinese to hold the line and blunt the Japanese assault, while Tokyo felt increased pressure to move quickly and secure China in order to meet the Soviet threat when it came.

The Mongolian People’s Republic was the first Communist country to come to China’s aid. Although unable to contribute many fighting men, Mongolia’s entry in the war did add a new front and diverted precious Japanese divisions away from the main fighting in the south.

The fierce fighting in Asia had prompted many westerners living in China to huddle in the foreign concessions, but when the Japanese made it clear that they intended to sharply curtail the extraterritorial privileges enjoyed by Europeans in China, many turned to evacuation aboard whatever ships they could secure passage on. Overzealous Japanese pilots attacked and sunk one British and one American gunboat as they ferried passengers. Causalities were light, and the matter was quickly resolved as all three powers showed little interest in adding war to their woes. An official apology and indemnity from Tokyo soothed most of the ruffled feathers, but it was clear that the world was becoming a more and more dangerous place.

The Third Balkan War and the Third Franco-German War

As with the Great War, both France and Germany were eager for opportunities to add to their respective military alliances and, in doing so, outflank their opponent. For fear of Bulgaria gaining backing from the Germans, French, or the presently neutral Italians, it was decided by Prince Paul and his advisers to respond to Sofia’s escalating incursions across the border with war. The bravado which had characterized the propaganda campaign against Bulgaria was gone, and only the most optimistic of observers believed that this war would be nearly as short as the civil war which had been fought a few short months earlier.

As of midnight, September 19th, 1938, Yugoslavia was at war with Bulgaria.

In light of the Royal Yugoslav Army’s disadvantages against the larger Bulgarian force, a risky strategy was orchestrated by the Nedić brothers. Holes would be purposefully left in the kingdom’s defenses so as to entice a Bulgarian advance out of the fortified positions which lined the frontier. The enemy was to be provided with easy passage into Yugoslav Macedonia, masked by a half-hearted fighting retreat, whereupon the bulk of the Royal Army’s forces would cut off supply lines and attempt to isolate and destroy the advance guard of the Bulgarian army piecemeal.

It was a risky strategy, both politically and militarily, and it was one that never would have seen the light of day had Belgrade not been so desperate. Prince Paul in particular was distraught at the suffering that might be visited upon the country’s Macedonian population which had already endured the brunt of the fighting in the civil war. Milan Nedić tried to assuage his guilt by hazarding a theory that the Bulgarians would be too keen to establish good relations with what they regarded as their future subjects to commit any heinous acts, but such words did little to settle the regent’s nerves. More material concerns were raised by the small size of the Royal Air Force. With every man called up being sent to fill out the ranks of the beleaguered army, there were few pilots and fewer planes available to contest the Bulgarian air force. Aerial observation could reveal the Royal Army’s plans, and harassment could delay their moves until Bulgarian reinforcements could arrive at key junctions.

Initially, Sofia did not appear to take the bait. Bulgarian forces hammered the strengthened points of the Royal Yugoslav Army, with the aim of breaking the back of the Yugoslavs long enough to deter any counterattack. The Macedonian countryside was riven with craters and trenches, but the Yugoslav army maintained their forward positions, with a few exceptions. Milutin Nedić’s forces were still battered, and Boris’s generals, smelling blood, decided to advance against the relatively undefended portions of the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. Across hastily abandoned emplacements and into Yugoslavia, the Bulgarian infantry swarmed, capturing Leskovac, which had served as the last refuge of the rebel generals during the civil war. Memories of the Great War electrified the invaders and horrified the defenders, as the Serbian surrender in the darkest days of 1915 seemed to portend another collapse.

Then, the Bulgarians grew overconfident, and gaps began to appear in their own lines, gaps which the Yugoslavs quickly moved to exploit. Infantry divisions detached themselves from the hardened centers of resistance and moved to cut off the lead invaders. Despite the strain of fighting and forced marches, the Yugoslav Army managed to cut off the vanguard of the Bulgarian army in the two towns of Leskovac and Vidin. What ensured was fierce days of fighting as the outnumbered Yugoslavs tried to simultaneously besiege the towns to destroy the Bulgarian interlopers and prevent reinforcements from reaching them. If they could manage those tasks, then the strategy concocted by the Nedić brothers would be proven successful and the imbalance between the Yugoslav and Bulgarian forces would be greatly rectified. If not, then half a dozen Bulgarian division would serve as the tip of a spear which could pierce Yugoslavia’s heart.

Elsewhere in Europe, the war between the French and German alliances had taken a turn in the latter’s favor. While the line of defenses along the French and Czech borders with Germany had held remarkably well against the might of the Wehrmacht, the concentration on the larger German threat, as well as the prioritization of the political, economic, and Czech heartland of the country, had left Czechoslovakia vulnerable to an invasion from the south. Fueled by dreams of reincorporating Slovakia into a “Greater Hungary”, the Hungarian army had broken through the relatively weaker fortifications protecting their neighbor to the north and soon reached the Polish border.

While Bucharest had been unwilling to intervene directly to save Slovakia, the Romanian government viewed the rapid Hungarian advance with alarm. The abandonment of the Little Entente alliance and the plans of King Carol and his government for Romania to position herself as a friendly neutral for both sides of the conflict seemed foolhardy in light of Hungarian successes in Slovakia. Under the changed circumstances, it seemed more likely that Hungary would seek to recover territory lost to Romania following the Great War and the overthrow of Béla Kun’s Bolshevik regime, and that Berlin would look more favorably on those claims on Transylvania.

Caught in a trap, the encircled Bulgarian divisions attempted to break out, but in doing so they left the relative safety of the towns they had captured for the uncertainty of the countryside. Expecting to be welcomed by the civilians of Yugoslav Macedonia as liberators, the invaders were surprised and unnerved by the chilly reception that they received. There were hardly as many acts of outright sabotage and violence visited upon the Bulgarians as the rebel Serb forces had suffered, with the local population waiting patiently to see which side would emerge victorious from this struggle. Attempting to rejoin their compatriots to the east and to set up a new base in Skopje, the Bulgarians were frustrated as the Yugoslavs moved in and captured the lightly defended towns which had fallen so easily to the initial Bulgarian assault. Efforts at relief were frustrated by a diversionary attack on the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Although his generals assured Boris that the feint was unlikely to succeed, they still ordered available divisions to concentrate on the defense of the capital rather than the relief of the divisions trapped behind enemy lines. As a further precaution, the tsar and his ministers moved the government to the royal summer residence, the Euxinograd Palace on the Black Sea.

Such preparations proved prescient, as Yugoslav forces drove away Sofia’s defenders and entered the Bulgarian capital tired but proud. The tide of the war seemed to be shifting in favor of the Royal Yugoslav Army, as the Bulgarians were clearly showing the strain. Both Balkan kingdoms had seen plenty of fighting since gaining their independence from the Turks, but while the civil war had greatly damaged the ranks of the Yugoslav military it had also greatly streamlined the command structure and given the Yugoslavs more recent war-fighting experience, augmented by the German military mission in the country and the observers who had been sent to the Spanish Civil War under the guise of the All-Yugoslav Relief Mission. The Bulgarian army, long subject to the envy and fear of its neighbors, had fallen behind following fifteen years of peace and the crippling terms of the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

A little over a month after the war’s beginning, the Yugoslav strategy finally bore fruit as two Bulgarian divisions, exhausted and out of supplies, surrendered to the Royal Yugoslav Army, shortly before the perimeter was broken. The units who escaped the encirclement were reunited with the bulk of the Bulgarian army, but with Belgrade riding high from the success of the Nedić’s strategy, attention moved to the three divisions attempting to escape from the pocket around Leskovac.

Romanian attempts at maintaining neutrality between the different European power blocs did not extend as far as surrendering the hard-won region of Transylvania to the unscrupulous Hungarians.

Preoccupied with a war on two fronts, Berlin attempted to moderate Hungarian ambitions and avoid the expansion of the war by arranging a conference with Budapest and Bucharest. The meeting in Vienna proved as fruitless as that in Munich. The Hungarian delegation was frustrated by the lack of German support for their territorial goals given the two countries’ common war effort, but grudgingly agreed to accept the compromise proposal put forward by the German arbitration whereby Hungary would receive the northern portion of Transylvania and relinquish all further claims against Romania. It had been hoped in Berlin that the German war against France, and especially the Hungarian conquest of Slovakia, would convince Bucharest of the folly of opposing Germany on this matter, but King Carol and his advisers did not see the war between Germany and France as a sign of the former’s seriousness to use force to rectify borders but rather as a weakness to be exploited.

Confident that Germany would be unwilling to antagonize Romania and risk her joining the French camp, thereby imperiling Hungary and the campaign against Czechoslovakia, the Romanian delegation roundly rejected the German proposal. For the second time in a few short months, German diplomacy and intimidation had failed to accomplish Berlin’s goal, and for the second time it appeared as though the only recourse for Germany would be war.

While the Czechoslovaks bore the brunt of the fighting, the French army primarily focused on shielding France from German attacks until mobilization could be completed, although a small incursion into the Rhineland was permitted in order to convince the Germans to divert some additional divisions to the Western Front. The population was fairly united behind President Pétain and his government in the early days of the war, with German aggrandizement seen as a continuing threat to the country and the territory of Alsace-Lorraine in particular, and as long as the war remained primarily a Central European affair that would continue.

Decisions and alliances were made haphazardly on both sides of the conflict, as long-term strategic concerns were prioritized less than short-term gains.

Seeking an advantage over the Germans, the French confirmed their commitments to Romania’s territorial integrity against Berlin and Budapest’s threats. The support was appreciated, and exchanges of personnel commenced, but the Romanian government remained wary of French intentions. The Czechs had thus far received little help from their self-proclaimed benefactors in Paris and the Romanians were unwilling to bear the brunt of the German military without tangible French assistance.

Meanwhile, in order to position forces to circumvent the Maginot Line, Germany declared war on Luxembourg after the tiny state refused to grant passage to German troops. While war planners in Berlin had hoped that the British acquiescence to the Munich proposal had signaled London’s unwillingness or unpreparedness to fight a war, the second Germany violation of the neutrality of the low countries in a lifetime invited a similar British response. While Luxembourg formally affiliated itself with the French alliance, Germany found herself also at war with the world-spanning British Empire.

In the middle of November, the Royal Yugoslav Army scored an unexpected victory. While the Bulgarians concentrated their offensive power on liberating Sofia from Yugoslav control, a cavalry and an infantry division had been isolated on the Greek border as Yugoslav forces penetrated deeper into Bulgaria. The Greeks, wary of Bulgarian designs on their territory, provided no refuge or relief for the newly surrounded Bulgarians and the Yugoslavs began the laborious process of starving them out even while brave soldiers attempted to hold Sofia long enough for their comrades-in-arms to finish their work.

The war between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, while not a “total war”, still saw monumental efforts from civilians to aid the war effort.

While the soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army fought valiantly in the kingdom’s hinterlands against the Bulgarian foe, the Yugoslav home front saw a great deal of activity. A new propaganda campaign was launched with the aim of rallying the war-weary populace to the defense of their homeland, with a particular emphasis on overcoming entrenched provincial attitudes. With a mixed degree of success, Belgrade’s finest propagandists worked to convince the kingdom’s Slovene and Croat subjects of the necessity of defending their Serb and Macedonian countrymen against the sinister ambitions of Boris and his generals. A secondary component of the Yugoslav propaganda was the separation of the Bulgarian people from their ruler and his government. Success here was also mixed, and counteracted by the simultaneous appearance of strident speeches and articles denouncing the Bulgarian people, but the overall hope was that the groundwork would be laid by the war’s end for the incorporation of the Bulgarians into the Yugoslav nation on the basis of their identity as fellow South Slavs.

Not all Yugoslav patriots served on the front lines or in government offices. The industrialists of Slovenia, long admired for their work in industrializing the westernmost reaches of the country and privileged through close ties and contracts with Belgrade were put in charge of a series of cartels which sought to rationalize the Yugoslav economy and increase its efficiency, which had long lagged behind those of other European countries.

The need to produce more material for war led to the construction of more factories, few of which were undertaken with foreign assistance besides that of Italy. These factories in turn demanded workers, and a migration of Yugoslavs from the countryside to the cities and towns of the kingdom reshaped the social fabric of Yugoslavia and exposed many young men and women to the first life that they had known outside of their small villages. For better or worse, the war was changing Yugoslavia and it left no one untouched.

The Course of the Wars

By December, the Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan on behalf of its Chinese allies. The winter fighting in Siberia and outer Mongolia was hellish, with thousands of men flooding into the barren land for the glory of their masters in Moscow and Tokyo. Initial Japanese gains had seemed promising, with the nearly complete capture of the northern half of the Sakhalin Island and penetration deep into the Mongolian People’s Republic. Absent a second front, however, it was unlikely that the Japanese and their Chinese collaborators would be able to hold out against the human tides which the Soviets and the Chinese forces could bring to bear. To this end, Tokyo extended some diplomatic feelers to anti-Communist governments in Europe, gauging the possibility of some measure of joint action. Preoccupied with European wars, little relief seemed as though it would be forthcoming from the west.

In Iberia as well, Communism appeared to be on the march. The Nationalist forces, virtually abandoned by their German and Italian benefactors, had been reduced to two small holdouts centered on Sevilla in the south and Galicia in the north. There, the last holdouts of Francisco Franco’s government held out against the vastly superior Republican forces. No small number of officers, religious and political officials, and civilians had escaped the country, with more arriving in Portugal every day. These would form the nucleus of Spanish diaspora groups which spread throughout Europe and nurtured fantasies of a triumphant homecoming and revenge against the Bolsheviks who had driven them out.

With the elimination of two more pockets of divisions which had been cut off from the main body, the Bulgarian Army suffered a tremendous blow. The numerical superiority which Bulgaria had enjoyed at the onset of the war with Yugoslavia had been overcome, and the loss of Sofia had dealt a serious blow to Bulgarian morale. Bulgaria’s smaller size compared to Yugoslavia meant that there was little territory which could be given up in order to buy time or entice Yugoslav divisions into a trap. Every week that went by seemed to bring news of another town falling to the Royal Yugoslav Army. The Bulgarian government which had reorganized in Varna was faced with a war which some thought was unwinnable, barring outside assistance. To that end, Boris sent out feelers in every direction, hoping to find sympathy in Rome, Berlin, or Budapest which could translate into an intervention which could turn the tide in the Balkans.

With Slovakia overrun by Hungary, it was assumed that the Czechs would soon surrender. Seeking to secure the southern flank of the alliance to concentrate forces against the west, Berlin offered Belgrade an alliance.

In light of Yugoslav successes against Bulgaria and the onset of a new World War, the German government approached Prince Paul’s government with a formal invitation to join the Berlin-Budapest Axis. Such an offer may have been tempting before Germany had become embroiled in a war with France and Britain, but worries about provoking the western powers into supporting Bulgaria just when progress was being made against the smaller country, led to Paul giving the German envoy a polite but firm response. Yugoslavia would remain neutral in the war between Germany and the other major powers, but would not be a party to a war waged on the basis of German and Hungarian ambitions. Under orders from Adolf Hitler himself, the German ambassador attempted to appeal to the regent’s Yugoslavist sentiments by offering German aid in gaining Southern Dobruja and Greek Macedonia for his kingdom. Other elements of the German proposal were more personal in nature, including the usage of a crack German commando team to rescue and return the Yugoslav royals which had been spirited away to Britain. This was the part of the offer which Paul had the hardest time rejecting, even more so than the veiled offer of his being made the head of a new royal Russian government. The death of Peter and the loss of the slain king’s brothers weighed heavily on Paul, but he not only believed that Germany could not fulfill such extravagant promises, Paul also believed that Germany would be unable to win the war.

Paul’s rejection of an alliance with Germany inspired a tirade against him and the whole Yugoslav nation by Adolf Hitler. The German Führer, who had once assured then-foreign minister Stojadinović that he did not view Balkan issues through “Viennese spectacles” unleashed the full force of his rhetoric against Belgrade. The Serbs and other Dinaric peoples, Hitler declared to his intimates, were backwards and incapable of higher civilization. Their subjugation under Austrian rule had been to their great benefit and to Austria’s great detriment. Prince Paul in particular was savaged as a hopeless Anglophile, unable to abandon his love of a foreign land even when its government had slain his cousin and had tried to overthrow him.

With the initial German overtures rejected, Berlin turned to the naked threat of force to earn Yugoslavia’s compliance. Neutrality was not an option; the Kingdom of Yugoslavia could either choose an alliance with Germany or war.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Twelve: All Roads Lead to Rome (December 1st, 1938 to June 5th, 1939)


The End of the Third Balkan War

As December wore, on, the tide of the war in the Balkans continued to turn in Yugoslavia’s favor. A bold advance nearly reached Edirne and the Turkish frontier by December 11th, and left another Bulgarian division cut off from supplies and reinforcements. As recently as a few months before the outbreak of the Yugoslav-Bulgarian war, Ankara had been open to the idea of admitting Bulgaria to the Balkan Pact which had been formed against her, and so Tsar Boris had attempted to seek aid from the Turks in the darkest hour of his rein. The Turkish government was willing to provide refuge for Bulgarian civilians and notables and to warn Belgrade not to cross the border into European Turkey, but unwilling to enter the war to save the tottering Bulgarian government, and so the war continued to turn against Boris and his clique of supporters.

The recapture of Plovdiv from the advancing Yugoslavs was a bright spot in the otherwise tragic Bulgarian war effort. Now two divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army were the ones who were cut off, victims of the ambitious plans of the Yugoslav government and generals who were pushing for a speedy conclusion to the war before outside powers might intervene. The elated generals on the other side of the conflict convinced Tsar Boris to relocate the capital again, or at least its military functions, to Plovdiv in order to keep a closer eye on the war and to demonstrate to the dejected populace that the country was still in the fight.

The temporary Bulgarian capital, as well as Varna where the tsar and his civilian government were still holed up, was soon cut off from the rest of the country by a small number of highly motivated divisions. Prince Paul and others in Belgrade hoped that a quick capture of those two cities would mean the collapse of Bulgarian resistance. The sooner that Yugoslav troops could be transported to the border with Germany, the better. But as the Croat and Slovene soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army celebrated their Christmas Eve, the Bulgarians had refused to surrender the last cities under Boris’s flag and were still hoping for relief from an outside force.

The Third Balkan War had provided a sideshow to the main conflict roiling Europe, but its end brought new attention to Yugoslavia and the rest of the region from the powers fighting elsewhere on the continent.

But no assistance, mortal or divine, was forthcoming, and a provisional government of Bulgaria formed by Zveno-affiliated officers surrendered to the invading Yugoslav forces with the capture of Plovdiv and the generals who had been headquartered there. Tsar Boris had managed to slip out of the country aboard a royal yacht along with some of his advisers and received refuge in Turkey. The Yugoslavs could do little to stop his flight, possessing no capabilities on the Black Sea, and there was little incentive to pick a fight with Ankara over the issue of a deposed monarch, not when the country was threatened with destruction by the Germans.

The dream of a “Greater Yugoslavia” was achieved at the expense of an independent Bulgaria. The process of integrating the new territories into Yugoslavia was complicated by war and memories of the Bulgaria which had existed before its incorporation.

The annexation of Bulgaria was hailed by Yugoslavist ideologues and the textbooks which they helped write as the fulfillment of the great mission. With the removal of Boris and his government, there was no competitor to the claim of the mantle of South Slav leadership, and the Bulgarians and Macedonians who had once paid fealty to him were now in one state which they shared with their brother Slavs. The end of the war with Bulgaria was marked with more celebrations than the end of the Yugoslav Civil War had been, although the enthusiasm of the populace was still muted with the threat of another war over the horizon.

The integration of Bulgaria was pursued haphazardly at first, with the Macedonian areas of the west coming to terms with the new status quo and the expanded rights offered to them by Belgrade while most of the ethnic Bulgarians elsewhere in the annexed territories resented the loss of their country and feared the fate which their new masters would visit upon them. Efforts to build legitimacy through local partners s had been done in Macedonia through cooperative elements of the IMRO were complicated by a bloody dispute between the Zveno organization which Paul and his advisors had been counting on for support in the newly liberated territories. While the Zveno had been in favor of an alliance with Yugoslavia during their brief governance, the Yugoslavist stance of the group was not uniform following the annexation of Bulgaria. The so-called “Big Zveno” quickly accepted Bulgaria’s new status as part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and willingly offered their services and expertise to their new countrymen. The “Little Zveno”, by contrast, had hoped that the Yugoslav invasion would mean the establishment of a new Zveno-led government with a degree of independence, not outright annexation. The right-wing government in Belgrade and Yugoslavia’s mercurial ties with Germany had disillusioned many of the men who had been idealistic Yugoslavists in 1934, and the conflict between the two wings of Zveno turned violent as Bulgaria’s new rulers struggled to keep the peace.

An Uneasy Neutrality

In response to Belgrade’s defiance, Berlin’s demands for the territorial reorganization of Yugoslavia meant the effective end of the country and the dream of a unified South Slav nation.

After weeks of preparation and veiled threats, the German government finally issued its ultimatum to Belgrade. The kingdom would be dissolved, with the Croatian subjects of Yugoslavia receiving their own state under “the guidance and protection of the Reich” and Slovenia annexed to Germany proper on the basis of its not insignificant German minority and its historic status as part of Austria. The Serb and Macedonian portions of Yugoslavia, as well as the recently conquered Bulgarians, would be reorganized as a protectorate with a degree of autonomy but subject to the authority of a German representative, or “Reich Protector.

It was an arrogant, heavy-handed ultimatum, much worse than the Austrian demands which Serbia had rejected before the Great War, and just as with that conflict, the Germans were threatening war should any of their demands not be met. Yugoslavia’s ability to survive a war with the full might of the German army and its Hungarian allies for more than a couple of weeks seemed doubtful, but Berlin was currently at war with much larger countries as well. Rejecting the ultimatum was the only answer, and it was hoped that the time needed for Germany to assemble the forces needed for an invasion of Yugoslavia would be enough to discover a way out of this predicament.

The German document had been delivered to Belgrade privately, and Prince Paul and Milan Nedić refused it through private channels as well, but leaks from the prime minister’s office, whether intentional or not, transmitted the information outside of the country’s leadership, and from there it spread to the common people. The broad sentiment was in favor of Radical Union government, as even members of the liberal opposition gave speeches and penned editorials that, while still critical of aspects of the current government, urged Yugoslavs to stand united against German threats. Most significantly, the analysts who had developed demands and argumentations for the German ultimatum had been working from faulty resources as the offer of a supervised Croatian state failed to elicit much public excitement from the kingdom’s Croat population. Indeed, students at the University of Zagreb organized a demonstration in support of the king and the government’s stance against Germany, with one of the homemade banners proclaiming, “We will fight for you, Yugoslavia!” It was an astonishing sea change in attitude from what the region had witnessed and struggled with only very recently.

The first new divisions raised to defend Yugoslavia against Axis threats were commanded by General Josef Depre, one of the many beneficiaries of the mass defection of Yugoslav officers during the civil war.

The popular outpouring of support for the Yugoslav government did little to slow German preparations for war. Plans for an invasion of Yugoslavia were much more stymied by the lack of Wehrmacht divisions available to commit to the attack, however. To deter an attack for as long as possible, policing duties in Bulgaria were handed over to civilian forces and all divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army were rushed to Slovenia in order to deter a German attack. Their ranks were bolstered by six new divisions drawn from the inaugural class of the system of conscription which the National Assembly had implemented. Some of their members were siblings or former classmates of the students who had rallied in Zagreb, and their enthusiasm was unmatched.

Still, in contrast to their compatriots who had crushed the much-larger Bulgarian army, these new divisions had received the barest minimum of training before being fielded. It was believed, or rather hoped, that Berlin would be too preoccupied with the rest of Europe to look too closely at the green recruits who made up the bulk of Yugoslavia’s new divisions. As their experienced compatriots arrived from Bulgaria, the fresh divisions were shifted to the Hungarian border. As successful as the Hungarian Army had been in Slovakia, its reputation was still nothing compared to that of German soldiery.

With Berlin threatening both Yugoslavia and Romania with war, the potential frontline in the Balkans stretched from Istria to the northern reaches of Transylvania.

By the start of February 1939, German divisions had begun to appear on the German and Hungarian borders with Yugoslavia. The first bricks of the coming build-up appeared anodyne enough. The German soldiers on the frontier at first appeared to be doing nothing more dangerous than participating in exercises and manning border fortifications, but as their numbers swelled in the coming weeks, the German divisions began committing small violations of the Yugoslav border and expanding those fortifications into armed camps directed against Slovenia and northern Croatia.

Lingering mistrust between the French and Yugoslav governments over the reversals and intrigues which had characterized the pre-war period dampened enthusiasm for cooperation against the German threat.

Belgrade’s break with Berlin had soon become public, and this raised hopes in Paris and London that the Yugoslavs could be brought onboard the anti-German coalition. The British were still on the outs with Prince Paul and the Yugoslav government, but the French were happy to extend an offer to renew the alliance with Yugoslavia. With the collapse of Czechoslovakia and the German divisions assembling on the kingdom’s borders, such an offer of military alliance appeared to so many Yugoslavs as a poisoned chalice. The stilted invasion of the Rhineland and the accompanying failure of France to support the Czechs inspired fears that Yugoslavia would be sacrificed in order to serve as a shield to protect France for a while longer from the war they had willingly sought.

Nonetheless, the French ambassador was not turned away outright. Instead, the overtures from France became bogged down in matters or protocol and the details of a potential military convention. While the delaying tactics frustrated Paris, the possibility of opening another front against the Axis was too tempting for the Pétain government to abandon the efforts. For Belgrade, it was enough to keep the French option available without yet committing to it outright. The German declaration of war could come any day, and in that event an alliance with France, and, to a lesser extent, Britain, would become an established fact no matter how many meetings and audiences had or hadn’t taken place.

The failure of the military coup against Prince Paul did little to dampen the enthusiasm for Balkan machinations among Winston Churchill and his accomplices.

While the French were desperate enough to engage in the latest bout of Yugoslav chicanery which had become the norm under Milan Stojadinović’s government, the British were not as accommodating. Even while the kingdom was in the midst of the war with Bulgaria, the British ambassador had paid an unannounced visit to the Foreign Ministry and demanded an explanation for why Yugoslavia was continuing to trade with Germany. Arguments of economics and security fell on deaf ears, as the British representative made it clear that his government did not want excuses, or even a more balanced trade policy between the Axis and the Allied powers. Instead, the ambassador demanded that Yugoslavia cease trading with Germany or else face the consequences of her actions. The threats rankled the kingdom’s leadership, especially Prince Paul. The kidnapping of the Yugoslav royal family by British agents was still fresh in his memory, and the implication of further British intrigues in his country soured Paul’s opinion of his once-beloved England even more.

When the British pressure campaign was brought up in a meeting between the French ambassador to Yugoslavia and the kingdom’s foreign minister, Ivo Andrić, Paris intervened on behalf of Belgrade in order to convince the British to moderate their demands lest Yugoslavia join the Axis powers out of protest. A begrudging compromise was found when the Yugoslavs offered to allow British ships safe harbor in the kingdom’s Adriatic ports and the transit of troops to reinforce Romania should the Germans declare war against King Carol’s government, but the wounds cut deeply. The ugliness highlighted the division between the British and French strategies for the war against Germany, based upon each country’s proximity the fighting was widening the gulf between the two western powers.

The Tempest of War

While the nationalist governments of France and Germany fought, the Communists completed their takeover of Spain.

A million Spaniards and foreign fighters had fallen or been captured in the war for Spain’s soul, a conflict which seemed set to continue intermittently though one side had decisively won. The Spanish Republicans, anti-clerical and nominally democratic, had faced the trials of the war against the Nationalists and emerged on the other side much harder and brutal in their practice of power. Gone were the parliamentary façade to the campaigns against the Catholic Church in Spain; the government in Madrid had learned to simply take church land, to arrest priests, and to break the seal of confession by force. Gone too were the public debates and elections over the direction of the country; the Republicans had learned to tolerate no dissent not even from supposed allies such as the Spanish anarchists or regional separatists. In order to triumph over a brutal foe, the Republicans had resolved to become more brutal than Francisco Franco’s collection of reactionaries, generals, and fascists, and in that they had succeeded.

The specter of a new Communist-ruled country, long-unseen outside of the Soviet Union should have attracted more attention, especially in France where the question of Communism in Iberia had helped bring the current government to power. Instead, the rest of Europe was preoccupied with the war and the new Spanish regime was left to its own devices. Aside from Moscow, it had no friends in Europe and many enemies, but the Republicans had found themselves in this position before and, after a long, bloody struggle, they had triumphed.

The Franco-Russian Entente had failed to match the German Empire during the Great War, but desperation caused Paris to seek an alliance with the Bolsheviks.

Despite public shows of bravado by the military government in Paris, renewed conflict with Germany was a terrifying thought to French of every social class. In the last war, it had taken the combined efforts of France, Britain, and the Russian Empire to halt the initial German advance and even then the dreaded Huns had almost reached Paris. Now, London and Paris were once again united against the Teutonic threat, but instead of Russia, their great eastern ally was little Czechoslovakia. Such a combination seemed to portend doom in the minds of the French leadership and so the unthinkable became not just plausible but desirable: an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Since the end of the Great War, French war plans had counted on allies to Germany’s east providing a second front which would divide German forces and ease the pressure on France and her war-weary populace. One of the chief debates, especially in the heady days following the Armistice when possibilities in Europe seemed endless, was whether to support a coalition of smaller states or seek rapprochement with the Bolshevik government in Moscow in hopes that they would soon evolve or be replaced by a “normal” Russian government. The former policy had initially won out, but not without infrequent shifts to the latter one. When Maxim Litvinov was the Soviet’s foreign minister, a renewed Franco-Russian entente seemed within reach, only to flounder on the refusal of Poland and Romania would allow troops from the Soviet Union to transverse their territory in order to aid Czechoslovakia.

Now, with both countries struggling mightily against the same foes that they had fought earlier in the century, the new Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, received a French envoy seeking to formalize a Franco-Soviet pact which would commit each country to the defense of the other’s territorial integrity. It was a bold move by the anti-Communist French government, especially in light of their regime’s origin and the Republican victory in the Spanish Civil War. It was one that showed France’s desperation for allies against Germany, but it was nonetheless rejected. Preventing the loss of Siberia and its Pacific ports to the Japanese was the first order of the day in Moscow, and the question of troop transit through Poland and Romania had still not been resolved. Short of shipping troops through the deadly waters of the North Sea to take up positions in France, there was little that the Soviet Union could offer France and, more importantly to Joseph Stalin and his fellow Bolsheviks, even less that France could offer the Soviets. French Indochina and other holdings in the Pacific were already woefully underprepared for war. All French involvement in the war with Japan would likely accomplish would be the addition of new fronts for the Soviets and their allies to manage through unchallenged Japanese invasions of Vietnam and the French concessions in China.

With characteristic bluntness, Molotov told his French suitor that the one thing that might have enticed Moscow into considering the treaty and war with Germany was the removal of Poland as a buffer state keeping the Soviet Union from Germany, and the rest of Europe. The situation was not yet so dire that Paris was willing to condone a war against Poland, not when Warsaw was still a potential ally. As such, the Franco-Soviet Treaty was stillborn, and it was soon overtaken by more pressing developments.

Polish victory in the Polish-Soviet War of 1918 to 1921 had expanded the country’s borders and its leaders’ egos. It was believed that Poland was strong enough to shape her own destiny and defend herself from her hostile, but embattled, neighbors.

With her two most powerful neighbors engaged in brutal wars and potential patrons otherwise engaged, Poland embarked on an ambitious mission of forging an alliance of neutral states in Eastern Europe which would be strong enough to withstand German or Soviet pressure. It was a bold project and one that attracted attention in Bucharest and Belgrade, as well as in the Baltic states to Poland’s north, but Józef Beck and his team of diplomats were unable to ask the uncomfortable question of how the alliance would fare in the event that the Germans or the Soviets won their wars elsewhere and then turned their attention against Poland and her allies. As Prince Paul bitterly reflected in his diary, the only options for the middle powers of Europe seemed to be either siding with the Germans or to helping to put them down.

The slow pace of the war in the west frustrated Adolf Hitler and his generals who were hoping for quick decisive victories, and so their attention turned to Czechoslovakia and the impressive gains which the Axis were making in that theater. The failure to break through the mighty Maginot Line was understandable in light of the years of work which had gone into its construction and the training of the soldiers manning it but the inability of the Wehrmacht to crush the tiny country of Luxembourg was a grave blow to the prestige of the German armed forces. Even more humiliating, territory had been lost to a joint French-Luxembourgish advance into the Rhineland. The expansion of the war with the German attack on Luxembourg had not only brought in the British empire on the side of France and Czechoslovakia, but it had not even succeeded in its aim of flanking the Maginot Line.

The Lithuanian alliance with Britain against Germany gave the Allies new bases with which to contest the Baltic Sea.

Undeterred by past failures at diplomacy, Berlin attempted to secure the return of the Memel region which had been taken by Lithuania from the dejected Germans in 1923. While the Czech, Luxembourgish, and Romanian governments had significant international backing, it was felt that the small Baltic country would fold in the face of German pressure. Once more, German calculations had been wrong and Lithuania steadfastly refused the German demands and tendered membership in the British-led alliance when Berlin declared war.

Mussolini’s Price

"War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death." – Benito Mussolini

As the fighting in Europe expanded, Italy found herself in a similar position to the one that she had enjoyed at the start of the last Great War. For Mussolini, neutrality was not an option and both the German and the Anglo-French Alliances were eager to win Mussolini for their cause. The opening of a new front in the French Alps or in Austria could bring victory to whichever side of the war which the Italian dictator chose to join. Unfortunately for Rome’s suitors, Mussolini was well aware of this fact and he drove a high price for his support, encouraging diplomats from the warring powers to compete in offering Italy concessions in return for her entering the war on their behalf.

The supplanting of Italy by Germany as the continent’s preeminent nationalistic regime still rankled Mussolini’s pride. He had long toyed with the idea of an alliance with Germany in order to confront the British and the French, but the rapid rise of the Nationalist Socialists under Adolf Hitler had given the Duce pause. Berlin seemed uninterested in serving as a junior partner in an Italian-led coalition, and the annexation of Austria and alliance with Hungary had meant the loss of two would-be Italian client states to German control. The question of South Tyrol, with its German population, weighed heavily on the Italian government. Adolf Hitler had renounced claims to the region in his book Mein Kampf, but the situation had changed dramatically since the German Führer had been merely an imprisoned rabble-rouser. With Germany at war with Czechoslovakia, France, Britain and now Lithuania over similar claims of ethnic kinship, no one was quite sure if Berlin’s designs wouldn’t someday extend to Italian-controlled territory as well.

The replacement of the French Republic with a French State modeled, at least in part, by Mussolini’s Fascist Party removed an ideological barrier to siding with the French. The British were even willing to hold their noses and work with the other continental nationalists in order to defeat Germany, although anything more than an alliance of convenience was out of the question. In hopes of winning Italian entry into the war against Germany, the French and British ambassadors offered Mussolini a free hand in the occupation and reforming of the Austrian and Hungarian lands should the anti-German alliance prove victorious. Further appeals included the possibility of border adjustments favoring Italian holdings in East Africa and a certain percentage of Italian influence in various Mediterranean countries.

Paris and London were limited in what they could offer by the smaller size of the pie which was to be carved up should they prove victorious, but Berlin was much less restrained. The destruction of the French and the British Empires offered much grander prizes for an ambitious country like Italy, more than enough to share, the German ambassador, Hans Georg von Mackensen, assured Count Ciano and Mussolini. Long-standing Italian designs on Tunisia, Corsica, and the French Alps could be awarded immediately following the victory of the Axis alliance over its foes, with further colonial possessions in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond available for spoils. In addition, should Italy prove hesitant, German plans for Yugoslavia made it clear that Berlin felt no compunctions about reordering the Balkans without offering compensation to Rome in this Italian area of interest. Thus, despite the best efforts of the western powers and the distrust the Italian government felt towards the ascendant Germans, a deal was struck between Rome and Berlin. Italy was now the third member of the Axis alliance.

The entrance of Italy into the war on the German side dismayed the French and British, but Yugoslavia seemed to be the country most threatened by the alliance.

The entry of Italy into the war marked a further escalation of the already explosive conflict. British and French fleets scrambled to win the Mediterranean from the forces of the Regia Marina, and French divisions were sent southward in anticipation of an Italian attack across the mountain range bordering the two countries. With Italy’s entry, Africa now became a battlefield as well and forces needed to be redeployed to meet the threat of Italian colonial forces stationed in Libya and Ethiopia.

Italy’s alliance with Germany gave the Axis alliance a longer frontline and additional troops to bring to bear against the recalcitrant Yugoslavs as well. The bulk of Italian divisions were sent to fight the British and the French, but a worrying number of them appeared in Istria and the coastal enclave of Zara to support the German build-up in the region. It seemed that time was running out for Yugoslavia’s neutrality.

Despite Italy reinforcing the alliance, Germany still suffered the loss of East Prussia to a joint Lithuanian and English task force. The territory was placed under Lithuanian control and the occupation by the authoritarian government of Antanas Smetona made little secret of its ambitions for annexing some degree of the German land should their side prove victorious. The loss was frustrating for the National Socialist government in Berlin, as the war had thus far resulted in more Germans living under foreign domination, not less, but spirits were buoyed by the fact that territory in that region had been lost to the Russians during the Great War as a temporary setback on the road to the great victories of the Eastern Front. Nonetheless, additional resources were devoted to the Kriegsmarine to build enough ships to contest the Baltic Sea and win control back from the upstarts in Kaunas.

The Hungarian conquest of Slovakia had cut off the Czech heartlands of Bohemia and Moravia from the non-Axis world, and meant that only a few men escaped the country to form a Czech government-in-exile in London.

What setbacks the Axis suffered in the north were soon overcome by the collapse of the Czech government following the surrender of Prague and Brno. The invasion of Slovakia by way of Hungary had proven a massive success and led to some in Budapest to call for the Czech portions of Bohemia and Moravia to be occupied by Hungary for the remainder of the war, but the idea was quickly shot down by Miklós Horthy in order to preserve good relations with Berlin. The Czech surrender was still a vital step forward for the Axis powers as it freed up a large number of divisions to turn back the French advance into the Rhineland, and also to man the borders with Yugoslavia in anticipation of another expansion of the war.

The long-awaited French advance into Germany faced stiffened resistance from the influx of divisions coming from the east. Meanwhile, the Italians faced hardly any opposition in their invasion of France and had soon crossed the Alps.

A Deal with the Devil

As with South Tyrol, Zara had been an issue of the utmost importance for nationalists during the 1920’s, but also one whose importance had been eclipsed by grander designs.

The fall of Czechoslovakia to German and Hungarian arms reinforced Berlin’s leadership of the Axis alliance despite the launching of more and more wars against new countries, but schemes were already being hatched in Rome to subvert the pact’s current hierarchy. The key, Count Ciano believed, would be expanding the alliance so as to diffuse German influence and preclude further German adventurism in Europe. To that end, he proposed, with Mussolini’s acquiescence, a new Italo-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty to replace the bare bones agreement of 1936. Italian membership in the Axis had heightened the danger of Hitler’s threats against Yugoslavia, and it was believed that Belgrade could be enticed into joining the alliance through the concession of Zara, an Italian enclave on the Dalmatian coast.

The prospect of giving up Italian territory was not an appealing one to Mussolini, especially after he had railed for so long against the “mutilated victory” which had deprived Italy of the Dalmatia coast which she had coveted as a prize for participating in the World War. Ciano and a select few others argued that, given Italian predominance in Albania and future acquisitions from France and Britain, Zara was an unnecessary irritant in the relations between two impressive Fascist kingdoms, both of which had reasons for working together to limit German hegemony over Europe. Italy could still be master of the Mediterranean, it was argued, and the Straits of Otranto, the gateway to the Adriatic, would still be in Rome’s hands. The strategy required not only concessions on the Italians’ part, but also from the Yugoslavs. Mussolini and his government had been involved in the joint Ustaše-IMRO assassination of King Alexander in Paris, and Italian support for terrorists and separatists in Yugoslavia and designs on the Dalmatian coast had been no secret. Joining the Axis alliance, and implicitly supporting its war against France, would mean disregarding the last words of the slain king. These were somber considerations, but so was the mounting number of German and now Italian and Hungarian troops massing on Yugoslavia’s borders. Questions of honor battled with those of the kingdom’s survival.

The mobilization of the Yugoslav economy for war was undertaken at a breakneck pace which produced impressive results but also numerous issues as inexperienced men learned to soldier or serve in factories.

The threat of war from Germany hung over the country like a guillotine’s blade and prevented the country from demobilizing after the Treaty of Varna. Instead, with the new conscription regime enacted by the National Assembly beginning to bear fruit, the Royal Yugoslav Army grew by leaps and bounds from its nadir of nine divisions to an impressive twenty-eight infantry divisions in a few short months. This rapid expansion was driven by the stockpiles of equipment built up and the aforementioned need to deter any German attack on the country by projecting as much strength as possible.

On the economic front, the rationalization of the Yugoslav continued. Although the kingdom’s economy had always possessed a significant degree of state interference, the influence of Italian and German thinking caused Belgrade to move closer to the corporate model espoused by those countries and further away from the free-market economics which London and Paris practiced. Although workers’ wages rose with the heightened demands for labor, the ability to strike was severely curtailed in order to prevent disruption in a time of national crisis. As long as things continued to go well, it was believed that Yugoslavia’s workers would remain loyal.

While Germany was unhappy that her bluster had not suitably cowed the Yugoslavs, the kingdom’s membership in the Axis meant a continuing flow of valuable mineral resources and foodstuffs necessary for the war effort.

For weeks, the Italians and the Yugoslavs had hammered out an agreement which was much more ambitious in scope than that signed only a few years previously. The economic clauses of the previous treaty were updated to reflect Yugoslavia’s new territories and industrial capabilities, with the two countries operating on a more equal basis, although the treaty still was tilted in Italy’s favor. Military and diplomatic considerations took up the bulk of the new Friendship Treaty, with Rome and Belgrade agreeing not to join in any military alliance directed against the other country and to consult on all Central and Southern European issues. Italy renounced all claims on the Dalmatian coast in exchange for Yugoslavia doing the same for Istria, although the treaty included clauses providing for minority rights for Italians in Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs in Italy. Lastly, the treaty included secret provisions delineating the two kingdoms’ interests in Greece and arrangements for joint military action in the region.

Notably, although the alliance paved the way for Yugoslavia to join the Axis, there was no requirement for Belgrade to join in Rome’s war with France and Britain. Mussolini was content to keep Yugoslavia friendly but uninvolved, so long as the war continued to go in his favor.

At Mussolini’s urging, Berlin renewed its offer of alliance to Belgrade and this time Prince Paul’s government accepted. The move was met with grumbling in some quarters of the National Assembly, but the highest political and military officials had been briefed by Milan Nedić and understood just how grave a position Yugoslavia had found herself in. Italian intervention had helped shield the country from war with Berlin for the moment, but the question was what price would have to be paid for this assistance.

The Italian advance into France was the cruel harvest of the vacillating military and diplomatic policy the country had practiced before the outbreak of the war as France faced the invasion without any developed plans for this contingency or any allies who might threaten Italy and thereby deter the invasion.

The small amounts of progress which the Allies’ continental forces had made advancing into the Rhineland came rapidly undone as battle-hardened German and Hungarian divisions reinforced the already substantial Axis build-up in the area and the need to contain the Italian to the south weakened the forces assigned to the French attack. The people and the lands of the Franco-German borderlands had seen more than their fair share of war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the natural barrier of the Alps and peace between France and Italy had preserved peace for the beautiful south of France for a long time. The success of the Italians at penetrating into France surprised all, especially the Italian generals who had expected a stronger initial resistance. After all, their forces had succeeded at not only threatening the region of France which boasted the strongest support for the Pétain government but also capturing the ports which provided vital lifelines between la Métropole and French North Africa. As Italian troops neared the Spanish border, Mussolini and his circle of advisers began to hazard ideas of what would follow a victorious war. Such flights of fancy remained so much fantasy for the time being, but the feeling was already forming that Italian and German designs for Europe would not be wholly in-sync.

Owing to the greater British presence in the fighting on the Dark Continent, the African front attracted much more attention in the Anglo-Saxon world and stories of daring actions and brave soldiers fighting in North Africa and Ethiopia peppered American newspapers with far more regularity than stories concerning the defense of France against invasion.

After the conquest of East Prussia, the brightest spot in the Allied war effort was in Africa. There, the Italian presence in Libya had been almost completely removed and French and British gains in eastern Africa had almost bisected the Italian colonies in the region, despite the fierce fighting by the Italians and their Askari troops. Troops which had been freed up from the now-safe Yugoslav border were to be sent to turn the tide in Libya, but there was no port under Italian control in the region and so they were instead diverted to assist with efforts in southern France. Control of the Suez Canal and Gibraltar prevented any link-up between the Axis fleets of the Regia Marina and the Kriegsmarine and helped the Allies win the war at sea even while the situation on land grew more and more dire.

The War in Asia

The jewel of the Far East had fallen to the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War as well, but that conflict over railways and spheres of influence had not been the life-or-death struggle that the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire now found themselves in.

In the Far East, the Japanese could point to the capture of the major Soviet port city of Vladivostok as a sign of the successful campaign against the Sino-Soviet alliance, with the capture of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar also on the horizon. The victories in Siberia and Mongolia had been achieved due to the superior organization and command of the Japanese forces compared to their Soviet opponents, but Communist reinforcements continued to flow into Siberia from the west and the long-term prognosis for the Japanese hold on the Eurasian continent was still uncertain.

Compared to the war in Europe, the war in Asia was seen by most Westerners as a sideshow fought by two inscrutable Oriental powers, and, like the Spanish Civil War, neither side seemed palatable to democratic sensibilities.

Gains in Siberia and Mongolia had been achieved at the cost of scaling back the men and material assigned to the Chinese front, with the result that the territory ceded after the skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge began to fall to Chinese control. However, Chiang still did not command the loyalty of all of his governors. The warlords of the Guangxi, Ma, Shanxi, and Yunan were wary of partnering with Chiang Kai-shek after his concessions to Japan had failed to forestall war for a longer period of time. Chiang’s alliance with Mao Zedong to defend China against the Japanese had seemed promising, but their inclusion of the Soviet Union into the coalition against the invaders sparked worries that a Communist regime would be enforced upon China by Moscow and its new dependents. Even Sheng Shicai, the Soviet-aligned governor of the Sinkiang province of China had thus far stayed neutral in the conflict. The Japanese invasion had thus far not touched the holdings of these skeptical warlords, and they were content to wait for the time being and see what the fortune of wars would bring to China.

Notwithstanding the neutrality of some segments of China, Japan still had found herself in a war with the two most populous countries in the world, and the empire’s holdings in Asia could be ground to dust between the two giants if nothing decisive was done to bring the war to a speedy end.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Thirteen: Reaping the Whirlwind (June 5th, 1939 to October 20th, 1939)


The Ljubljana Conference and Axis Plans for the Balkans

Despite Prince Paul’s hopes, the formal alignment of Yugoslavia with the Axis powers did not lead to a prolonged period of peace. The neutrality that had been navigated between the Germans and their foes was always an uneasy one, and the regent had hoped that, although committing the kingdom to one side, Yugoslavia would be able to sit out the war as a useful auxiliary. After all, the country was bordered by three Axis-aligned powers and the Italian-supported Kingdom of Albania, while no countries in the Balkans were yet British or French allies.

Paul’s hopes were quickly dashed as military planners on both sides of the conflict sought to counteract or take advantage of Yugoslavia’s ascension to the Axis. Although frustrated at being outmaneuvered by Rome and Belgrade, the German leadership in Berlin sought to use Yugoslavia as a springboard to exert Axis dominance on the European continent by preventing the Franco-British coalition from using any currently neutral country as a spearhead against the alliance’s “underbelly”. Once France was crushed and Europe united against Britain, Adolf Hitler and his inner circle hoped that London would sue for peace. To that end, a conference was arranged at the Slovene city of Ljubljana between representatives of the various political, diplomatic, and military leaderships of Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. The minutes of the meeting were sealed until the end of the war in Europe, but they illustrate the uneasy bedfellows that the Axis alliance had made of the four nationalistic regimes.

At the Ljubljana Conference, the fate of the Balkans was decided. Germany had begun laying the groundwork for increased pressure on the Greek government to align with the Axis against British intrigues, but after repeated failures of German threats to persuade smaller countries, it was decided to leave nothing to chance. A build-up of forces on the Yugoslav border with Greece was arranged with the approval of both Prime Minister and Field Marshal Nedić and the less enthusiastic support of Prince Paul. After Bucharest made clear that it would regard any moves against Greece as an act of war against Romania, a token force was also arrayed on the Romanian-Yugoslav border while the bulk of Hungarian and German troops in the region massed on the Transylvanian frontier.

Germany had little hunger for Greek or Romanian territory when compared to the appetites of her allies. Content with the removal of a potential British ally from the flank of the Axis, Berlin was happy to play the mediator between the competing claims of Rome, Budapest, and Belgrade in an attempt to exert leadership over the alliance and to bind the various powers closer to Germany while simultaneously driving wedges between them. In contrast, the Hungarian representatives were the most strident of those assembled in their demands for all of Transylvania, not just the northern region which had Germany had tried to solicit out of the Romanians months earlier.

On the basis of Bulgarian ambitions to the regions, Belgrade put forward claims on the Romanian territory of Southern Dobruja as well as Thessaloniki on the coast of the Aegean Sea. The presence of a sizable population of Bulgarians in the former and Macedonians in the latter area helped the Yugoslav government present these aims as being in the spirit of ethnic self-determination. The Italian delegation was far less restrained and quickly demanded that Rome administer a compliant government ruling over the rest of Greece. Disputes over the boundary between Italian and Yugoslav claims appeared acrimonious at times, but behind closed doors the leaders of the two countries had agreed to settle such matters bilaterally once the time came, and to push back against suspected plans for German domination of the rump Romanian state which would emerge after the war.

With Yugoslavia committed to, detractors would say complicit in, the Axis alliance, German leadership felt confident to go ahead with the annihilation or subjugation of Greece.

Before the Storm

On June 20th, 1939, it appeared as though the first notes of the French alliance’s swan song were heard throughout Europe. Luxembourg, the plucky little country which had defied German arms for so long had fallen to the Axis powers. Other cracks were beginning to show in the French Maginot Line despite the wall of fortifications receiving the lion’s share of French attention and the best men and equipment. The “War of the Walls” had raged since the start of the fighting, but while it appeared as though Maginot might hold for much longer, the rest of France was in serious jeopardy.

Italian forces had met with only sporadic and ill-prepared resistance from the French army as they advanced through the country. By the time that a coordinated defensive line of makeshift trenches had scarred the line, the country had been bisected. The Italian army headquarters established at the resort town of Vichy sat atop the mobilized might of an awakened and fearsome Italy, one that seemed to grasp a kernel of the Roman greatness of which Benito Mussolini had long spoken. Many of the divisions which had divided Italy between monarchists and republicans, Catholics and secularists, and the rich and the poor were bridged over in the euphoria of victory. For those who were opposed to the ends of the Fascist government as well as its means, the impending victory over France brought many of them to the brink of despair.

Week by week, the Italians advanced north, bringing more and more of France under their sway as they marched to the tantalizing prize of Paris. President Phillipe Pétain and his ministers refused to evacuate the city to a more defensible redoubt. Rumors spread like a plague throughout France that the London had offered to host the old marshal’s government only to have been brusquely rejected. The truth was that, indeed, many among the British leadership were strikingly indifferent to the fate of their continental ally. Despite the success of local commanders in coordinating operations against Italy’s African colonies, proposals for joint naval actions and a new British Expeditionary Force floundered on clashes of personality and politics. As the war dragged on, critic’s voices rang out in parliament to provide justification for letting Paris wither away. The war to defend Czechoslovakia had been the wrong war at the wrong time, it was argued. Better that France should have followed Great Britain’s lead and let the Germans win this small victory in order to buy time to let rearmament programs and covert operations bear fruit. Besides, the French government with its military character and nationalistic rhetoric was little better than the German and Italian regimes which formed the Axis. Debates over how much France deserved her fate added one more barrier to British aid crossing the English Channel.

Meanwhile, spurred on by heady propaganda comparing them to the Roman legions of old, the Italians drew closer and closer to the City of Light.

Yugoslavia Joins the War

The Ljubljana conference concluded with the understanding that Yugoslavia would soon commit to supporting the war effort of her Axis allies should Greece prove resistant to German demands. With Berlin’s track record, it was clear that such a conflict was a matter of “when”, not “if”, and so the National Assembly in Belgrade was encouraged to pass legislation which shored up the country’s material and ideological position in anticipation of the coming war. A series of bills touching on matters as disparate as education, military promotion, and internal trade sought to further establish a shared Yugoslav identity among the kingdom’s subject peoples, especially the recently pacified Macedonians and the newly conquered Bulgarians. For those who were not swayed by patriotic assemblies and other more intangible benefits of belonging to the Yugoslav nation, another strategy was employed. Workers saw their wages go up and stricter enforcement of safety standards and the eight-hour day in factories. The use of child labor was strongly discouraged as young Yugoslavs were funneled into schools to receive a patriotic education instead. The immediate gains for the kingdom’s working classes were hard to determine, especially in the wake of the war which followed, but for the time the loyalty of the country’s lower classes was won.

On August 16th, the Greek government rejected German demands for the country to align with the Axis alliance and accept a Berlin-appointed commissioner to oversee the reorganization of Greece into an Axis protectorate. Ten days later, the Axis powers declared war.

In preparation for the war, Milutin Nedić had moved his forces away from the now-peaceful frontiers with Germany, Italy, and Hungary and to the Balkan arena. Twenty-three infantry divisions, a mixture of hard-eyed veterans and new recruits, conducted the Yugoslav invasion of Greece while six other divisions joined the German forces on the Romanian border. They, along with the motley fleet of a hundred foreign bought and domestically produced fighter planes, made up the forces which Belgrade had decided to bring to bear in the Balkans. The Royal Yugoslav Navy, with its outdated, outnumbered, and outclassed ships, was to remain in port rather than risk humiliation and destruction at the hands of any of the Allied navies. Much to the embarrassment of the Yugoslav military, even a hypothetical one-on-one confrontation with Lithuania would be a hard-fought fight for Admiral Marijan Polic and his sailors.

The weakness of the Yugoslav navy became a more pressing matter when an Australian force landed on Italy’s Adriatic coast, bypassing the Straits of Otranto of which Rome was supposedly the master. The decision was a spur of the moment decision made to attempt to ease pressure off of the French, and it was quickly repelled, but it highlighted the reach of the British navy. Yugoslavia’s deficits at sea were worrying, but there was no time to rectify the imbalance now. It could only be hoped that no such force would find its way to Yugoslavia’s shores.

Even though the Italians repelled the poorly supported landing, the mood in Yugoslavia was dreary at the prospect of another war, the third in so short a period. A slim majority of the country was in favor of the conflict, but for many their support was born out of resignation rather than ambition. Yugoslavia might make some small territorial gains, but the primary aim of joining the Axis and their war had always been defensive in nature. It was understood that to preserve Yugoslavia, it had been necessary to take a side, and now that the die was cast it was the task of the Royal Yugoslav Army to fight the war with all of the tenacity and daring with which they had already served their nation so well.

The bulk of Yugoslav forces concentrated on the border with Greece were the only Axis troops in the arena and they launched the initial attack on the Greek lines. In contrast to the Yugoslav Civil War and the war with Bulgaria, the Yugoslav Royal Army enjoyed an advantage in numbers and so General Kosic was able to adapt the tactics which had initially been developed for use against Bulgaria. Heavy artillery bombardment preceded any advance by the Yugoslav infantry, which sacrificed the element of surprise in favor of obliterating the Greek defenses with fire and shells. The initial pushes were effective, and a contingent of seven Greek divisions were caught in Thrace. Prioritizing the destruction of the enemy armies over a rapid but unsustainable advance, Kosic dedicated half of the divisions under his command to the destruction of the encircled Greeks while the rest of his forces pressed south into the then-lightly-defended Greek heartland.

While it was all but certain that Greece would join the Franco-British alliance in response to this aggression, Adolf Hitler gambled that the Romanian guarantee of Greece’s independence was empty blustering. After all, he lectured his subordinates, the Romanians were well-aware of the might of the German and Hungarian armies given the conquest of Czechoslovakia. The only thing letting Bucharest hold onto Transylvania was the restraint Berlin exercised on the baying Hungarians. Furthermore, Romania was too isolated from the British and the French, too close to the Soviet Union, and too dependent on investment and trade with Germany to risk war over such a nonentity as Greece. It would be a suicidal course of action for a king and a country who had made an art out of self-interest.

Fair as all of those points may or may not have been, they did not prevent King Carol from declaring war on Germany and Yugoslavia on behalf of the Greeks and accepting a British invitation to join the coalition against the Axis powers.

The Romanian entry to war came suddenly enough that German troops had not reached their assignments on the Yugoslav-Romanian border, with the greater focus going towards reinforcing the Hungarian army in anticipation of a drive to seize Transylvania in the same manner as Slovakia. For nearly two weeks, the heartland of Yugoslavia was laid bare before the Romanians and a determined march could have brought Carol’s armies within artillery range of Belgrade’s suburbs. But Bucharest launched only limited offensives and did not press the advantage. Remembering the opening stages of the Yugoslav war with Bulgaria, Romanian generals fretted that the apparent lack of defenses was a ploy to entice them away from their entrenched positions and into a trap. This hesitation bought Belgrade crucial time to mobilize seven more ill-trained but well-equipped divisions to augment the German forces which were belatedly coming to the aid of their Yugoslav allies. Nonetheless, it was not an auspicious start to the war.

However, the Yugoslav capital was not the only one in danger. Axis spirits generally, and those of the Yugoslavs more specifically, were lifted by the sudden capture of Bucharest in the opening days of the war as the Romanian army was stretched thin across the long border with Hungary and Greater Yugoslavia and concentrated primarily on repelling an attack from the former. The bold advance paid testament to the new generation of officers and enlisted men who made up the regenerated Royal Yugoslav Army. Supporting attacks were launched to maintain the hold on the city. The conquest of Bucharest not only meant the flight of the Romanian government and the loss of a great deal of its industrial base, and it also gave Yugoslavia a stronger position for the eventual peace negotiations, if she could hold onto her prize.

King Carol was defiant, even with the loss of his capital, and he quickly set up a new government in Cluj, almost taunting the Hungarian and German forces with his proximity to their lines. Romanian sallies against Hungary had thus far been unsuccessful, but Carol and his generals made public proclamations of their willingness to fight to the bitter end. Such statements were not entirely born out of bravado; London had informed its eastern allies that relief was already on the way.

The entirety of the Royal Yugoslav Army had been thrown into the fighting in Greece and Romania on the basis of two assumptions which proved faulty. The first was that the Italian navy would be able to provide enough of a challenge to British and French predominance of the Mediterranean as to deter any threats to Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast, and the second was that, should the Italians fail to check this threat that a crop of trained militias would be organized by the time that the Allies posed a threat to the kingdom. Instead, a landing force of Australians once more navigated the Strait of Otranto and occupied the hard-won city of Zara.

The success of the maverick Australians was short-lived, and they retreated back to British territory rather than struggle against the Italian divisions mobilized to root them out. With Mussolini’s soldiers singlehandedly responsible for liberating Zara, it was feared in Belgrade that the Duce would demand the return of the city to Italian control as the price for its rescue. But to the shock of all, perhaps even Mussolini himself, the Italian leader was magnanimous and the commander of the Italian forces in the city willingly submitted themselves to review by the city’s young Yugoslav government. It was an astonishing step forward in Italo-Yugoslav relations and Prime Minister Nedić sent a personal telegram thanking and flattering Mussolini in equal measures. The response from Rome was enthusiastic, informing Belgrade that mutual respect and unity of purpose between the Italian and Yugoslav kingdoms was the best hope for peace in Europe.

Enemies Within and WIthout

Notably, the response neglected Germany, and Italy’s position towards her Teutonic ally was notably less generous. All of the sweat and blood which German soldiers had given and German arms had wrought from the French defenders of the Maginot Line seemed to be for naught as the commanders of that impressive wall of fortifications moved to surrender to the Italian forces advancing from the south rather than to the Germans who had been bombarding Maginot for months. Their Italian counterparts insisted on a joint surrender to both Axis powers, but then pointedly assumed administrative command of the region “pending the conclusion of the war… and a thorough inquiry as to the wishes of the population…”. It was a cruel, unnecessary snub, but also one that the Germans could not respond to, at least, not at this time.

Although yet unable to settle their rivalry on the battlefield, both Germany and Italy worked hard to woo the smaller members of the Axis alliance to their side through both rhetoric and material support. When it came to appealing to Belgrade, Rome could point to the friendly behavior of Italian soldiers in Zara as well as the intervention which deflected Germany’s wrath and made Yugoslavia a member of the Axis alliance rather than its victim. Berlin tried to make appeals on the basis of the long-range interests between Germany and Yugoslavia being more harmonious than those between Italy and Yugoslavia. Partisan diplomats were all-too-eager to point out the past mistreatment and future schemes of one side or the other against the South Slavs as well. One advantage which Germany possessed over her Italian rival was a stronger manufacturing base and a less demanding occupation regime, which meant that she could offer Yugoslavia shipments of a wide array of German firearms and munitions while the Italians had to scrounge together shipments of rifles to compete. More often than not, captured French weapons were among those shipped from Rome. Once again, Yugoslavia found herself pursued by two mutually antagonistic powers, and past experience had taught her leaders just how dangerous that situation could be.

Although only in its early stages, the war was already changing the social fabric of Yugoslavia. The way that so many of the kingdom’s loyal subjects were united on the battlefield and facing great risk and hardship for their nation seemed to vindicate the Radical Union’s Yugoslavist platform. A bill passed through the National Assembly which sought to abolish the practice of constructing army regiments only from soldiers with a common ethnic and religious background. Although the Prime Minister and his brother privately doubted the efficacy of the kingdom’s non-Serb or Montenegrin soldiers and fretted about the effect that a reorganization of the military would have in the midst of the war, Milan Nedić nevertheless was persuaded to sign the legislation and gave a speech in which he touted the Royal Yugoslav Army as the school of the nation. The move was not merely a reaction to facts on the ground, but also an attempt to shape them by encouraging Macedonians and Bulgarians to enlist and fight for Yugoslavia or at least for their homes through the territorial militia program.

The forces that General Kosic had assigned to eliminating the encircled Greek divisions performed admirably, preventing any breakouts and slowly wearing them down until the last of them surrendered in the city of Alexandropoulos. Once more the Turks, who had lost ownership of the city to Bulgaria in 1913, which had then lost it to Greece following the Great War, were uninterested in providing safe haven for Yugoslavia’s desperate opponents, despite British entreaties to do otherwise.

Kosic’s decision to prioritize the destruction of the Greek divisions trapped in Macedonia had a profound impact on the course of the war in Greece as the first stage of the campaign wound down. With only half of the general’s divisions dedicated to the rest of the country, the Yugoslavs were unable to push any farther into Greece, no matter how much artillery was dedicated to the task. The Greeks had called up their own reserves and the numerical tide was rapidly turning against the Royal Yugoslav Army, especially with the Romanian army to contend with as well. The British were coming to the aid of their Greek allies as well, dedicating an initial force of two infantry and one tank division to the task of holding back the Yugoslavs. Kosic had little choice for the time being but to dig in, much to the frustration of the Nedić brothers who had been hoping to crush Greece before outside help could arrive.

With the closing of the pocket in Macedonia and the calcifying of battlelines elsewhere in Greece, Milutin Nedić reassigned six infantry divisions from the Greek front to the Romanian front in hopes of sparking further wins there. Once they were in position, an offensive was launched which aimed to capture the cities of Craiova and Ploiesti. Ploiesti in particular, with its rich oil fields and refineries, was a high priority for the Axis militaries which were bereft of the overseas colonies and resources which provided their opponents with the lifeblood of war. If the city fell under Yugoslavia’s occupation, then the kingdom would control two of the most important factors for deciding Romania’s fate when the war was over.

The thinly spread Romanians were unable to handle the concentrated force of Yugoslav firepower and both cities came under Belgrade’s control. The loss of Ploiesti came as a shock to King Carol’s government and the country’s defenders were left scrambling to plug the hole in the lines that the Yugoslavs had wrenched open. An advance force of three infantry divisions was sent to take as much advantage of the confusion as possible to penetrate as boldly as they dared into the Romanian interior. Already General Depre was distinguishing himself from the more cautious Kosic. Consolidating his gains did not appeal to Depre nearly as much as pressing his advantage, and so he sent Belgrade a short but thrilling inquiry: “Cluj or Bessarabia?”

Milan Nedić headed the faction which favored a drive to Cluj in order to capture the loathsome King Carol and his inner circle at the temporary seat of Romanian government. The old general turned prime minister even gave voice to fantasies of Yugoslavia mimicking Italy’s success in France and forcing a Romanian surrender right under the nose of Miklós Horthy and his overconfident Hungarian army. More cautious voices, led by Foreign Minister Ivo Andrić and supported by Prince Paul favored the drive to Bessarabia instead. The move was still a bold one, cutting Romania in half and securing the rich Black Sea coastline for Yugoslavia to occupy, but it would avoid ruffling feathers in an alliance already fraught with tension. There was also the concern that the Allies might grow desperate enough as to ask the Soviet Union to intervene on their behalf. It was unlikely with the Soviets still preoccupied with their war with Japan, but it wouldn’t hurt to sever the land connection between Romania and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as a precautionary measure.

In the west, the French army had finally halted its retreat from the invading Italians to rally around the so-called “Orleans Line” which ran through the town of the same name and guarded the third of France which was still under Paris’s control. The protection of France and her capital was in the hands of some of the divisions which had been assigned to the Maginot Line as well as those which had tried to check the Italian advance. Combined with the British expeditionary forces London had finally, grudgingly, sent across the channel, the Anglo-French forces enjoyed a decisive superiority over Rome’s legions, while the sulky Germans were hesitant to reinforce the position of their rival within the Axis. Still, the British and the French hesitated to launch a counterattack, giving the Italians time to dig in for the brutal fight ahead. Paris lay less than a hundred miles from Italian lines.

France was not the only beneficiary of a more active British policy regarding the war on the continent. The initial divisions which had reinforced the Greek defenses against Yugoslavia had given Athens time to raise reinforcements equipped and paid in large part by London’s generosity. The Greek divisions outnumbered those of the Royal Yugoslav Army dedicated to that front, but the Yugoslavs were supplemented by Belgrade’s Axis allies. Italian mountaineers and German tanks helped to match the build-up in the Balkans and served as the latest example of the ways in which Berlin and Rome were courting the favor of their Balkan ally.

The British divisions which had been stationed in Greece made a startling reappearance on the beaches of Croatia and Montenegro. They were checked by a hastily redirected force of German and Italian troops who were in transit to the Balkan front, as well as the marshalling of six of Yugoslavia’s new militia divisions.

Once the initial surprise of the British invasion wore off, the Axis had formed a wall of men and steel around the lost territory and began to work to push the British back into the sea. The Yugoslavs and their allies had the advantage of numbers, but General Momcilo Ojdanic, a former aide of Milan Nedić’s who had been promoted to generalship, felt the pressure from Belgrade to act quickly. It was politically embarrassing to have suffered a second landing in two months, and there were also fears that Allied reinforcements may make the British landing zone an ulcer which would become more and more painful to remove the longer that it remained untreated.

Even as Germany and her Axis allies faced stiffening resistance in Greece and British intervention in Yugoslavia and France, Berlin was already reviving territorial demands against Poland, even though it risked opening up another front in a war that was already spiraling out of control.

The War and the World

The rise of right-wing nationalistic regimes which had risen to power in Europe and Japan set off alarm bells for many champions of liberal democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt, well into his second four-year term as the leader of the United States, was watching the developments across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with great alarm. He had campaigned for reelection in 1936 on a platform focused on domestic programs bringing the American economy out of the throes of the Great Depression, but his opposition to the German and Italian dictatorships was public knowledge. The overwhelming majority of American citizens viewed the outbreak of two wars, between the Franco-British coalition and the Axis in Europe and between Japan and the Sino-Soviet alliance in Asia, as unfortunate but not worth intervening in. Not only were the wars seen as contests between several distasteful regimes which did not directly threaten American security, but the failure of American intervention in Europe during the Great War had failed to bring about the era of peace and stability that President Woodrow Wilson and his administration had promised. Too many American lives had already been lost in this century, it was argued, propping up the empires of the ungrateful British and French.

While the American people were wary of getting involved in overseas conflicts, President Roosevelt worked surreptitiously to bolster his preferred sides in the conflicts abroad, namely the British and the Soviets, with grudging support also provided to the French and the Chinese governments that were allied with London and Moscow. Debate raged within Roosevelt’s administration over whether the European revisionists or the Japanese posed the greater threat to the country’s interests, and also what could be done to sway the war-wary public into favoring intervention. A campaign was organized to shift public opinion and congressmen, but more importantly, and unknown to other cabinet members, Roosevelt also authorized Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace to reach out through his contacts in the defunct Progressive Party to Earl Browder the general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.

Earl Browder and Franklin Roosevelt were two willful and ambitious men who each believed that he could use the other to advance his own goals. Ultimately only one of them could succeed.

Unlike his chief rival for leadership of the American Communist movement, William Z. Foster, Browder had largely reconciled himself to the Roosevelt administration and the president’s domestic agenda as the first stage of an American “Popular Front” which could, with the aid of militant socialists among the volunteers returning from Spain, bring the country closer to a Communist takeover. His connections within the labor movement and contact with the Soviet Union helped him to serve as a bridge between Washington and Moscow. Browder's presence in the administration in any sort of capacity would have been an anathema to all but the most loyal Roosevelt men, so the association between the general secretary and the president was kept buried under layers of intermediaries and secrecy. Even so, the connivance between the two men began fostering a more favorable impression of the Soviet Union specifically and Communism in general in the American populace, with grave consequences to come.

Unlike the Soviet Union, Great Britain was not an international and ideological pariah and so President Roosevelt was able to be much more open about his support for London in the war against the Axis. Ties between the British government and the Roosevelt administration grew stronger and contact more frequent as Roosevelt labored to portray the British war effort as a noble endeavor to preserve democracy and human dignity against oppressive governance. While not abandoning the neutrality act which he had signed in 1936 outright, Roosevelt worked carefully at its margins to undermine its intent. Intelligence sharing between the US and Britain increased sharply and war materials were offered to British buyers before any competing power might lay claim to them. The boldest stroke of this policy was the transfer of several aging destroyer squadrons from the United States Navy to the Royal Navy in exchange for British island holdings in the Western Hemisphere. While not directly intervening in the war, Roosevelt and his government had made it clear to all which side they favored in Europe, even as the administration’s true policy toward the war in China and Siberia was purposefully obscured.

While the Soviet Union had provided a valuable ally militarily, Chiang Kai-Shek was still wary of what the Bolshevik government in Moscow had planned for China’s future. In order to gain his government much needed leverage from the machinations of the Soviets, Chiang dispatched envoys to the British and the United States government to secure aid for the Chinese against the Japanese invaders. Neither Anglo-Saxon power had any love for Tokyo and its plans for an autarkic Asian empire which would shut out European and American commercial interests and colonial holdings. At the same time, Chiang’s persistent appeals for aid earned him the nickname “General Cash My Check” among the cattier members of Congress.

The American aid to Great Britain and both countries’ assistance to China were just a few strands in the web of war which began to ensnare the globe as warring powers began to seek allies and advantages among those fighting in other continents. The flagging trust for Marshal Pétain’s military government led London to increase the size and improve the fortifications of the British garrison in Gibraltar, eager to prevent the Regia Marina from escaping the Mediterranean and joining up with the German fleets to threaten England proper. The strengthened British presence in Gibraltar also served as a warning to the Communist regime in Madrid that the His Majesty’s government would be prepared to meet any Spanish challenge seeking to reclaim Gibraltar for the newly rechristened People’s Republic of Spain.

Meanwhile, the Bolshevik government in Moscow, while still focused on the war with Japan, also took stock of the deteriorating military situation in France and began preparing defenses in case the Axis powers turned their ire on the Soviet Union next. A war on two fronts might stretch the Soviet military to its breaking point, so efforts were redoubled to reverse Japanese gains in Siberia and to lay the groundwork for a grand “anti-Fascist alliance” with Great Britain and the United States.

Moscow’s Growing Reach

Although Soviet rhetoric towards Britain and America had grown more amicable, the Bolshevik practice of power continued to be as hard-nosed and brutally efficient as ever. In the west, Moscow began a pressure campaign in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. While on one hand the campaign aimed to agitate the industrial urban proletariat of the three countries in order to pressure their governments from below to improve ties with the Soviet Union, Moscow communicated its need for military access and bases directly to Tallinn, Riga, and Kaunas. Such a move was seen as a key move to prepare the Soviet Union from anticipated aggression from Germany and her Axis allies, but the Baltic states had fought too hard for their recently-won independence to be enthusiastic about being reabsorbed into another imperial project, whether Tsarist or Soviet in nature. All three countries were allied with larger protectors, and thus Lithuania turned to Britain and Estonia and Latvia to Poland as a guarantor against Soviet ambitions on their territory. The blow might come later, but for now it was enough for Josef Stalin that he had made his position known to his potential allies, and to his potential victims.

In the east, the risks of displeasing Moscow were made apparent by the bloodless coup which forced Mao Zedong out of the leadership of China’s burgeoning Communist movement. Fearing increased Soviet control over the Chinese Communist Party, Mao sought to “rectify” errors in thinking among the party’s membership by conducting self-criticism sessions which would identify and hobble rivals within the party and leave him in sole control of the movement. The move was met with unexpectedly fierce resistance owing to the ongoing war against Japan and the Soviet Union’s aid in that conflict. The wily Sheng Shicai, governor of Sinkiang under Chiang’s Kuomintang government and a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, became a figurehead for opposition to Mao. Shicai’s backers argued that winning the war against Japan had to take priority over ideological witch hunts. Mao was publicly chastised but privately furious at what he saw as Soviet intervention in the affairs of China’s politics and Communist movement. The damage was done, and Mao lost his leading position in the Communist Party of China.

Certainly, Moscow made no secret that it endorsed the positions of Shicai’s faction, which leaned more on orthodox Marxism rather than the peasant-centric model championed by Mao. Behind the scenes additional weight had been given to the opposition within the party through a pledge that Sinkiang would join the war effort against Japan and ease the vulnerability felt by many Chinese Communist Party members in the Shaanxi province. That Shicai had reaffirmed his loyalty to Moscow and established his independence from the Nanking government was no doubt also pleasing to the Soviet Union, and the ability to move troops through the desolate Sinkiang region gave Stalin an additional point of pressure that he could use to mold China to his desires.

The War in Asia

To relieve the Japanese divisions which were being repelled in China’s coastal Shandong province, another naval invasion was launched to the south. From Formosa, Japanese marines made landfall in the southern half of Chiang’s domain, dangerously close to his capital in Nanking. A rapid advance ensued as the Chinese army struggled to redeploy forces to meet this new threat, but soon the Japanese invaders were encountering fierce resistance from the National Revolutionary Army and were clinging desperately to the coast where they could be supported by the guns of the Japanese navy.

Further north, the Japanese had continued to advance into sparsely populated Siberia. The Trans-Siberian Railroad was the main artery for both the defenders and the attackers as the rest of the region was largely undeveloped and bereft of easy lines of communication. The Japanese had at the very least learned from the lessons of their last war with Russia and had equipped their men with warmer clothes, but winter was rapidly approaching and it was feared that freezing temperatures and other hazards of nature would halt, or even reverse, the invaders’ gains while Moscow continued to flood more divisions into the theater.

The Imperial Japanese Army may have been weakened vis-à-vis the navy through the purge of the young officers of the Imperial Way faction following the abortive coup in 1936, but the army’s leadership had nevertheless received its desired war against the Soviet Union with Moscow’s entrance into the Chinese war. The men atop the powerful Japanese navy feared the eclipsing of their influence in country, and sought ways to regain it. As the war on the mainland slowed and Soviet and Chinese resistance hardened, the prospect of a long war loomed on the horizon. The navy’s prestige could be redeemed by rescuing the army from its own hubris through an idea that was alternatively labeled “bold” and “reckless”.

To that end, naval officers began preparing their case for a “Southern Thrust” which would, they argued, support the current war in Northeast Asia. The Japanese Empire was woefully short of the fuel and raw materials necessary to power the mighty war machine which was conquering China and Siberia. The availability of these inputs was largely reliant on the goodwill of the Western powers of Britain and the United States, and with signs of both London and Washington warming to the Bolshevik regime in Moscow it was unclear how long Japan could rely on Anglo-American goodwill and permission to continue the war against the Communists and the Chinese.

Frustratingly, the very resources needed were in Tokyo’s backyard, with French Indochina possessing a bounty of rubber and British and Malaya and the Dutch East Indies boasting both rubber and rich oil fields which could feed the empire’s planes, tanks, trucks, and ships. As the Franco-British war with the Axis turned more in the latter’s favor, it was believed by Japan’s naval officers that London would be unable and unwilling to mount an effective counterattack to a Japanese seizure of British colonies in East Asia. The Dutch East Indies was an even more tempting target owing to the perceived unwillingness of Britain to involve herself in another war when not under direct attack by the Axis. Finally, it was felt that the Pétain government’s deteriorating position left French Indochina ripe for the taking. Such moves, the admirals and other officers argued, would help the Japanese continue the fight against Communism in Asia with renewed vigor.

While the partisans of the Japanese navy made their case, a further step towards another World War was taken with Tokyo’s ascension to full membership in a new Tripartite Pact. While the original agreement had been a limited agreement between Germany, Italy, and Yugoslavia regarding issues in the Balkans and Central Europe, the new pact was crafted with far more ambition. The three capitals of Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo agreed to respect each other’s spheres of influence; Berlin in northern and eastern Europe, Rome in the Mediterranean region, and Japan in east Asia; and to come to each other’s aid in the event that war was declared against one of the signatories. The Pact did not obligate any of the three powers to join in any of their current wars, but it did serve as a warning to the British, Soviets and Americans not to meddle in any conflicts which they were not a party to, lest the full weight of the revisionist powers be brought to bear against them.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Fourteen: Shackled to a Madman (October 20th, 1939 to January 16th, 1940)

Turning Europe into an Inferno

On October 24th, 1939, the German ambassador in Warsaw delivered an ultimatum to the Polish government, demanding the acquiescence of Danzig and the so-called “Polish Corridor” coming under Berlin’s control, as well as plebiscites to determine the fate of Poznan and the eastern portion of Upper Silesia. On October 25th, the Poles refused the German demands and began mobilizing their armed forces. On October 26th, the Germans declared war.

While German grievances against the young Polish Republic were long-standing, the move still came as an unwelcome shock to Berlin’s Axis allies. The leaders of Italy and Yugoslavia were outraged by the unilateral moves made by the German government. Even Hungary, usually the most steadfast German partner within the pact, was horrified, as Miklós Horthy had to jettison the country’s historic friendship with Poland in order to protect Hungarian gains. With little time to prepare, the Axis now faced the sizable Polish army, one which had held back the Soviet invasion of Europe after the World War, and an eastern frontline which stretched from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Poland’s allies in Estonia and Latvia, feeling secure behind the British navy and Lithuania, also joined the war, a sign that even the smallest countries in Europe felt that they could stand with impunity against Germany and her alliance.

Incredibly, the German ultimatum and the declaration of war which had followed it had not been backed up by any semblance of the force which it would take to make the Poles comply. Even after failure after failure of German threats, there was hardly any Wehrmacht presence on the border with Poland and Warsaw’s generals were able to block the paltry German attempts at invasion while launching a few choice strikes of their own into Prussia and occupied Slovakia. German recklessness and arrogance had caused the country to blunder into an incredibly risky two-front war, and as such was roundly condemned in Rome, Belgrade, and Budapest even as it was toasted in London, Paris, and other hostile capitals.

The time for recriminations would come later, if it came at all. First, the Axis had to work to adapt to the new balance of forces in the east. While Hungary redeployed forces away from the Romanian front in order to protect Axis gains in Ruthenia and Slovakia, the Royal Yugoslav Army pushed itself hard to try and advance into Romania as much as possible before the arrival of Polish reinforcements and reached Brasov in Transylvania before having to halt.

In the process of their advance, the Yugoslav forces managed to encircle seven Romanian divisions in two pockets and destroy them. It was a victory, yes, but one far outweighed by the flood of Polish soldiers coming to Bucharest’s aid.

The dangerous German foreign policy had the added effect of further driving Italy and Yugoslavia closer together. The reopening of a permanent Italian diplomatic mission in Yugoslavia showed the progress which Rome and Belgrade had made in a few short years, and the exchanges and conferences held between the Italian National Fascist Party and the Yugoslav Radical Union seemed to be laying the groundwork for further cooperation. The liberation of Zara and the assistance of Italian units on the Romanian and Greek fronts had done much to endear the Italians to the political and military elite of Yugoslavia, but a campaign of goodwill was still needed to convince the broader public and intransigent individuals that the hatchet with Rome was truly well and buried.

One of the fruits of the closer ties between the two Mediterranean powers was Italian assistance in rebuilding Yugoslavia’s shattered air force. The defection of so many officers and pilots during the civil war had undone much of the work that had been put into expanding and modernizing the air arm of the Royal Yugoslav Army. The Nedić brothers were wary about devoting too much time to aviation for fear of creating the nucleus of another coup, but Prince Paul, in one of his increasingly more frequent interventions into government and military policy, decreed that the kingdom must have a proper air force. The regent’s stated rationale was the necessity of protecting Yugoslav subjects from bombardment and other aerial privations, but there was also a very real sense that the army, already possessing the post of prime minister, could not be allowed to become powerful enough to eclipse the monarchy and civilian government in Yugoslavia. A competing center of power would diffuse the army’s reach and highlight the royal prerogative in the country.

Nonetheless, Paul was reluctant to revive the air force outright after the disastrous coup spearheaded by its officers. Instead, with Italian assistance and the pleasantly surprised assent of Admiral Marijan Polic, it was decided to develop a naval air arm first, which would be responsible for patrolling the coast of the Adriatic. In time, such a force may be able to provide a deterrence against the Allied warships operating with impunity in Yugoslavia’s territorial waters.

Not even two weeks after the entry of Poland into the general European war, Adolf Hitler again stunned his allies, as well as his own generals, by proposing another expansion of the conflict. The Polish threat had been checked, he argued to a stunned audience of the German general staff and foreign liaison officers, and the time was right to knock France out of the war. While a frontal assault through the Maginot Line had been foolhardy, and had ultimately resulted in a temporary Italian occupation of Elsass-Lothringen, an attack through Belgium would outflank the French and allow for a final advance on Paris. Furthermore, the German Führer argued, it was necessary to punish Belgium and the Netherlands for their “phony” neutrality by which they continued to trade with Britain and furnish intelligence and funds between London and Paris. Bringing the Low Countries to heel would close off another British avenue to the continent.

Hitler brushed off suggestions for prudence and caution from his generals and ordered them to assemble any forces that they could spare from less vital fronts, something which was not lost on the Italian, Yugoslav, and Hungarian envoys who were left with the uncomfortable feeling that their military situations would suffer for Hitler’s ambitions. The presentation was delivered to the general staff as a fait accompli, but efforts by Germany’s allies to halt or delay the invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands similarly fell on deaf ears. Besides the question of committing the already-overstretched German forces to yet another front, the intransigence which Luxembourg had shown in the face of German words and weapons made it seem obvious to detractors that the Belgians and Dutch would not be the easy prey that Adolf Hitler’s diatribes made them out to be.

Plans for German invasion of the Low Countries were finalized only a few short weeks later, even as Rome, Belgrade, and Budapest despaired. The only concession they received was a promise by Berlin to delay the attack until the start of 1940.

Axis Challenges in the Balkans

While the Germans were dragging the Axis alliance into more and more conflicts, the Yugoslav government was approached by the Italians with a proposal for matching the Teutonic expansion with a Roman triumph. A common factor in the various treaties signed between the kingdoms of Italy and Yugoslavia had been an agreement to discuss any potential changes to the status of Southern Europe, and Rome was looking to collect on that investment.

Italian interest in Albania had predated the last Great War, and since its end Rome had viewed the small Balkan kingdom as falling within its sphere of influence and had expanded its economic and political penetration of Albania, sparking fears in Yugoslavia and resentment in the court of the Albanian president-turned-king, Zog I. What Count Ciano proposed to Ivo Andrić was an outright annexation of Albania by Italy, joining the two kingdoms together in a personal union held by King Victor Emmanuel III. The Italian foreign minister tried to assuage his Yugoslav counterpart’s fears that any ultimatum delivered to Tirana would be rejected as roundly as those Berlin had issued to Athens, Bucharest, Luxembourg, Prague, Warsaw, and, for that matter, Belgrade. Albania was already essentially an Italian colony, the count claimed, with a national bank run by Italians, a government staffed by Italians, and a military trained by Italians. All that was necessary was formalizing the control that Rome had over the country.

Direct control over Albania would enable Italy to better control the approaches to Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast, Ciano argued, and it would extend the front line with Greece and cause the dispersal of the worrying build-up of divisions on that front. Finally, it was pledged that the new Italian administration would rein in any Albanian ambitions on the Kosovo region of Serbia. Although the conference had the air of a meeting between equals, it was clear to Andrić and his government that Yugoslavia’s refusal of Italian designs on Albania was not a realistic option. Since it had already been agreed that Zog’s kingdom was within the Italian sphere of influence, Belgrade gave its assent to Rome’s move against Tirana.

The Italian promise of relief in Greece and protection in the Adriatic came at the right time for the struggling Yugoslavs. The Australian invasion which had been expelled from Zara may have been repelled, but it highlighted the weakness of Yugoslavia’s coastal defenses. Under pressure from Winston Churchill and his clique, the British government had commissioned a larger invasion of the Balkan kingdom, what the operation’s supporters dubbed the “soft underbelly” of the Axis alliance. By early November, the British attackers had successful landed and occupied valuable miles of Yugoslav coastline. The ten British divisions which set up camp in Montenegro and southern Croatia resisted efforts by the combined Axis forces to evict them, even with the addition of half-a-dozen hurriedly deployed divisions of the fledgling Yugoslav territorial militias. While the balance of forces prevented an Allied breakthrough towards the valuable Yugoslav heartland, the British presence on the Adriatic was still a humiliating reminder of the kingdom’s ill-preparedness for war as well as an additional pressure point for the Allies to use against the Axis.

“At all times, whatever happens, we will respect the inviolability and neutrality of Switzerland.” – Adolf Hitler, 1937

Even as the Axis alliance was being stretched to its limits by the new fronts opened by the bellicose German foreign policy, most recently the declaration of war on Belgium and the Netherlands as 1940 dawned, Berlin began plans to attack Switzerland, a neutral island in the middle of Axis-controlled territory. Ideologically, war with the mountainous federation was predicated on the German and Italian-speaking populations in Switzerland needing to be incorporated into the neighboring nation-states. More practically, it was believed that seizure of the vast financial resources which the Swiss possessed would allow the Axis to match, in part, the loans and subsidies which London provided its continental allies, and the American loans which Washington in turn offered the British.

The operation took its name from its finalization during a Yuletide meeting of the inner circle of the German government and military. The plan was delivered to Mussolini first, and then to the Hungarian and Yugoslav governments. While Rome would be happy to benefit from the destruction of the multiethnic Switzerland, the timing of the planning was viewed as incredibly foolish. While the Swiss were surrounded on all sides by the cloying embrace of Germany and Italy, the mountainous border was largely undefended by Axis forces due to Switzerland’s long-standing neutrality. The need to redeploy forces to take out the Swiss would mean weakening lines in France and the Balkans, just when Allied resistance in those theaters was stiffening.

The promise of territorial and financial compensation from the conquest of Switzerland was enough to win the grudging acquiescence of the Italians and the Hungarians were eager to stoke the egos of their German patrons, but Prince Paul’s government made it clear that, while the Yugoslav government, might declare war in solidarity with the kingdom’s alliance partners should Switzerland formally align with the French or British-led alliances, it would provide no assistance in the war in the Alps. The German ambassador’s relay of this message to Berlin was accompanied by a sardonic quip about how the mighty Yugoslav army and air force would be sorely missed.

On the other side of the war, the British began moves to expand the fighting to yet another arena.

As the heart of Europe was ripped asunder by war from the Atlantic to the Aegean Sea, the few remaining neutral countries on the continent came under increasing pressure to declare for one side or the other. In the face of cajoling and threats from Berlin, Paris, and London, the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland banded together in a loose pact of neutrality. Their strategic location and resources were an asset to both waring sides, and a cause for seeking to deny such benefits to the other side. Learning from the experience of Poland, whose own attempt at aloof neutrality had failed to prevent war, the various countries turned to the last great power in Europe who was not involved in the continent’s war.

The decision to approach the Soviet Union for diplomatic and material support was a difficult pill to swallow for all of the Scandinavian governments, but some form of accommodation with the Communist juggernaut seemed to be the least bad out of a set of terrible options. Moscow was eager to vigorously seize the tentative hand of friendship offered by the frightened governments, and it was feared that such an embrace may not be an easy one to break.

With an eye towards improving their security situation in the west, the Bolsheviks had waged a long campaign of destabilization and agitation in Europe, including in the Scandinavia countries. Now, the rhetoric of the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish Communist movements underwent near-identical shifts overnight. No longer did they make known their opposition to the very form of their home governments. Instead, they presented themselves as champions of peace and the fiercest defenders of the nation, provided of course that it did not conflict with the Soviet Union’s own interests. The lifting of bans and persecutions on the Communist parties in the region was accompanied by a sudden windfall of cash and expertise supplied by Moscow. From their new posts in government, the Scandinavian Communists set about swaying the proletariat to their side, and turning select members of the government, military, and other elites into agents of the revolution.

The Finnish case was the most challenging, as the Communists in that country were faced with the unenviable task of advancing their cause of friendship and alignment with the Soviet Union while Moscow agitated for territorial adjustment in order to give Leningrad, the second most-prominent city in the Soviet Union, a more defensible position. Such was the fear of being dragged into war that the government in Helsinki made some grudging concessions to dialogue with the Soviet ambassador to the country over the state of the border between the two countries.

With Warsaw engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the Axis powers and the stabilization of the Siberian front, Soviet leadership saw fit to press their claims against Poland herself. Communist-backed agitation began in earnest for the return of territories lost with the end of the Polish-Soviet War in 1921. The return of Poland to the “Curzon line” drafted by then-British Foreign Secretary following the First World War was justified on the basis of ethnic self-determination for the Belarusian and Ukrainian populations in the disputed region, as a means of advancing the frontiers of Communism and striking against the “reactionary, imperialistic” Polish Republic, and in practical terms as a valuable buffer against invasion from the west, and from an increasingly bellicose Germany in particular.

The initial reaction of the Poles to the Soviet posturing was incredulity and scorn. Stalin was already struggling to deal with the Japanese and now he proposed to go to war with the same country which had bested the Soviet Union twenty years ago? Poland was holding its own against the Germans and Hungarians, and, it was believed by the most defiant members of the Polish government, headed by Field Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, that a two-front war would be a disaster for the Soviets, just as it was proving to be one for Germany. Not only did Warsaw enjoy formal treaty commitments with Riga and Tallinn, but the informal ties with the British and French alliances would also bear fruit by coming to the aid of Poland. As such, Rydz’s clique argued, any war against Poland would see the total destruction of the Soviet Union as an entity.

The brashest voices were free to make their case against those who were more pessimistic about Poland’s chances against both the Germans and the Soviets. Meanwhile, Moscow continued its plotting and worked on laying the groundwork for a war in the west even as the war in Asia entered a new stage.

A Unification of China

On the other side of the Eurasian landmass, the war in China was entering a new stage. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek was facing a revolt from within even as he fought against the Japanese enemy without. Other members of the Kuomintang government had long been browbeaten and marginalized by Chiang’s autocratic leadership style, but the near-loss of Nanking combined with other failings to bring the Generalissimo down. The replacement of Mao by a Kuomintang-aligned warlord turned proxy of Moscow was seen as an indictment of Chiang’s war against China’s Communists for having driven them to a closer relationship with the Soviets while, paradoxically, the alliance with the Soviet Union was seen as proof that Chiang’s concession of territory and national honor following Japanese provocations at the Marco Polo Bridge was wholly unnecessary.

A heterodox coalition of figures met Chiang in his office and caused him to sign a prewritten document in which he ceded his titles and positions in the Kuomintang government “for the sake of the nation”. By the account of one of the coup’s central figures, Chaing was sullen and withdrawn even as he relinquished the power which he had carefully built up and jealously guarded. He was escorted out by an “honor guard” of hand-picked men and a new government was formed.

The new Chinese regime was structurally similar to the one it replaced, with the President of the Republic holding expansive powers. The man who was chosen to fill Chiang’s vacated post was Li Zongren. A popular and talented general, fierce critic of Chiang Kai-Shek’s rule and handling of the war with Japan, and steadfast anti-Communist, Li’s elevation was taken as a sign that China would not tolerate domination by any foreign power, whether imperialist or Marxist. Accordingly, the more conservative members of the United States government and diplomatic corps welcomed the change, while the Soviets were suspicious of their new ally, despite Li’s assurances that he would honor the alliance with the Moscow and the truce with the Chinese Communists in order to drive out the Japanese.

Sensing weakness in the changing Chinese government, the Japanese Empire took the bold step of expanding the war to include the hitherto neutral Chinese provinces under the control of the Ma and Yunan Cliques. The latter was viewed as a valuable conduit for British and French assistance to China through Burma and Indochina. Ambitious Japanese figures looked far ahead to the fall of China and believed that holding Yunnan would allow Japan to threaten the British Raj and therefore reduce the threat of London contesting Tokyo’s Asian empire. As for the Ma, the Japanese appeared to be interested mainly in ensuring that there would be no safe haven for the Chinese, Kuomintang or Communist, to employ as a redoubt. Now, the fate of all of China was at stake.

The warlords of these two regions, Long Yun and Ma Bufang concluded hasty pacts of alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union while simultaneously strengthening their ties with the new Kuomintang government operating from Li Zongren’s powerbase in Nanning. Soviet access to China was no longer limited to Mongolia and Siberia and the two warlord cliques provided forces of their own. Combining those men with those of Li Zongren’s New Guanxi Clique, the Sino-Soviet alliance had received a significant increase in strength as, with the exception of the still-neutral Shanxi Clique and the Japanese puppets in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, China was united against the Japanese aggressors.

While the anti-Japanese coalition was expanding, Tokyo worked to counteract this largely self-inflicted deficit in forces by approaching the Siamese. Bangkok was wary of getting embroiled in a conflict with the Chinese and the Soviets, but the lack of a shared land border with any belligerent powers was one factor in the Japanese envoy’s favor. The real target of the alliance was not China, however, but instead the French territories in Indochina. The Siamese had designs on Laos and Cambodia and with Paris fighting for survival in Europe, it was thought that little would stop the Japanese and Siamese from carving up Indochina as they saw fit.

But even as Japanese diplomats were working to woo Bangkok, the military saw fit to widen the war in China even further by moving forces against the territory of the last neutral warlord in China, Yan Xishan. Yan had maintained a strict neutrality since the start of the conflict in order to continue his efforts to transform Shanxi into a “model province” for the rest of China driven by his own eclectic political philosophy. The long period of peace had also enabled Yan to build up a sizable army in order to defend his borders from threats from the Japanese, Communists, or Kuomintang. In response to Tokyo’s declaration of war, these forces were thrown at once against the Japanese-controlled territory around Beijing.

Further north, the fighting in Siberia between the Japanese and the anti-imperialist coalition was slowing down with the onset of winter. Isolated battles were the norm rather than pitched contests of maneuver and heavy firepower. The Japanese had reached far into Mongolia and were even able to threaten the northern frontier of the Ma lands, but as of January 1940 had thus been unable to knock Ulaanbaatar out of the war.

Even as Tokyo was seeing to it that most of the Asian continent would be embroiled in war, its leadership was careful to avoid antagonizing the United States. With the American giant’s gaze torn between Europe and Asia, it was believed that any action which would attract unwelcome attention from Washington, D.C. would be most unwise, especially as the new left-wing advisors in the Roosevelt administration were increasingly hostile to and reluctant to aid the anti-Communist Kuomintang government. As such, plans for an invasion of the American colony in the Philippines and a surprise attack on the American fleet headquartered in Hawaii were quietly shelved, much to the interest of Washington’s codebreakers.

A reckoning between the Japanese and the Americans over the fate of the Pacific was all-but-inevitable, but, at least in the moment, prudence stayed the onset of war for a while longer.

Advances and Setbacks: The War in Europe

The Italo-Yugoslav reproachment had paved the way for Rome to formally cement Italian control over Albania. While King Zog made promises to the contrary to the British and French ambassadors in Tirana, when the Italian ultimatum for a personal union between the two countries came, Zog folded outright. The British presence in Greece and Yugoslavia was not enough to convince him to try and resist Rome’s demands. Instead, the king fled abroad with his family and the national treasury in tow, leaving ordinary Albanians behind to be transformed overnight into subjects of King Victor Emmanuel III. Zog set up a hastily constructed government-in-exile in London and soon set about hosting lavish dinners and enjoying the social scene of his new home country.

The response to the Italian triumph in Albania within the Axis alliance was not entirely positive. The German leadership in Berlin was furious and befuddled by the success of the Italian diplomats compared to their own ham-fisted efforts to force concessions from smaller countries. The development was met with indifference by Budapest, and by outright worry by Belgrade.

The generals and politicians in Belgrade were not worried about any further Italian designs in the Balkans, at least not for the foreseeable future, with Rome having promised to rein in any Albanian claims on Yugoslavian territory. Rather, their concerns were more concrete – the sudden change in Albania’s status from a neutral country to part of the Axis alliance meant that the front line against the Anglo-Greek forces was expanded. Despite Italian assurances that they would have forces ready to move into Albania and deter any British advance, it fell primarily upon the Royal Yugoslav Army to defend Rome’s gains. What followed the annexation of Albania was a short but nerve-wracking race to the sea as the Axis and Allied forces attempted to outflank each other and gain an advantage, no matter how small, against their entrenched foes.

By the middle of January, 1940, the general staff in Belgrade was petitioning their German and Italian counterparts for reinforcements and a few token divisions were dispatched to try and stem the Allied advance into Rome’s new acquisition.

Now under pressure from the British on two fronts, to say nothing of the Romanians, the Yugoslavs were scrambling to hold their own. War planners in London had decided that Belgrade was the weak link in the Axis alliance. Knocking the Yugoslavs out of the war would expose Italy, Hungary, and Germany to invasion and could be the first step in ending this horrific and continually escalating war. Thus, the pressure was kept up on those fronts, with British reinforcements sent into Greece and Croatia and Bucharest encouraged to hold fast until Prince Paul and his coterie were brought to their knees.

Facing stiff resistance and counterattack from France and Poland, Berlin and Rome were reluctant to commit too many of their forces to southern Europe, not when victory in those more appealing fronts had seemed so close mere months earlier. Enough men and material were granted to the Balkans to try and stave off a Yugoslav collapse, but the immediate goal was to staunch the bleeding, not to outright drive out the invaders.

More Axis forces were dedicated to crushing Romania, the corresponding weakest member of the Allied alliance as Yugoslavia was seen on the Axis side. Romanian oil fields and a southern front against the Polish were the fervent hopes of the Axis war planners, along with the promise of freeing up troops to stem holes in other warzones. But aside from the destruction of two additional Romanian divisions, the Axis advance against Romania had slowed to a crawl at best. Even more force was needed to push through, but to add power to any Axis advance it would be necessary to leave other fronts vulnerable. Mistrust and squabbling amongst the Axis powers, especially between the Germans and the Italians, meant that any agreement on who would bear the sacrifice would be hard to come by.

North of Romania, the Polish army had repelled the initial, confused German attack and advanced into western Prussia. Slovakia, which had passed into German administration in light of Hungarian reluctance for war with Poland, had seen further Polish advances. To the consternation of the Czech leaders operating from London, Warsaw refused to commit to restoring Czechoslovakia’s pre-war borders. Besides the long-standing issue over the status of the border region of Zaolzie, the Poles were also conscious of the attitudes of the Slovaks. Long subjected to Prague’s dictates, many Slovaks welcomed the Polish as fellow Catholics and Slavs who would help them gain independence. Mindful of the Soviet threat to the east, the Polish leadership tempered Slovak expectations in hopes of wooing Hungary or the Czechs to an anti-Bolshevik coalition, but Prague’s warm relations with Moscow did not inspire hope. Like so many issues, the question of Slovakia was to be put off until the end of the war.

After more than a month of build-up, the Anglo-French forces launched a new offensive against the Italians to close 1939 and continued straining forward as 1940 dawned. The Orleans line had held Mussolini’s legionaries from knocking France out of the war and now the French and their British allies were able to make incremental progress in throwing out the invaders. The Germans, preoccupied with the deteriorating situation in the east and still smarting over Rome’s seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, refused to commit enough divisions to halt the Allied advance completely. Instead, it fell to the Italians to meet the challenge. The optimism which had accompanied their drive into France was soon replaced with frustration as they retreated past rivers and towns which they had already captured. But the Royal Italian Army did not give ground easily and the Italians forced the French and British into brutal winter fighting for every mile. Even as losses mounted, the Allied commanders grew more and more confident in their ultimate success.

The Axis alliance seemed to be splintering under the combined pressure of enemies to the west, east, and south.

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Fifteen: A Stunning Reversal (January 16th, 1940 to June 12th, 1940)

The Smaller Fronts

With every passing day, the British presence on the Yugoslav coast was becoming more frustrating as Yugoslav shipping diverted to safer ports and British planes buzzed even Belgrade despite the best efforts of air raid teams to deter them. But, before the end of January, the Allied forces operating in Dalmatia overreached and left a path clear for the Royal Army to liberate the city of Split from British control. Capturing Split choked off six British divisions from supplies, and divided them into two pockets of three divisions each. While a mixed force of Axis divisions from Yugoslavia, Germany, and Italy kept the British forces in Montenegro bottled up, the rest of the Yugoslav forces on the coast began the slow, unpleasant work of extracting the invaders from their homeland.

After the first pocket in Croatia was eliminated, the Allied forces around Zara were driven away from the city and began a long retreat towards Rijeka and the Italian border, but they were constantly harried by sustained attacks by a rotating force of Yugoslav attackers on the ground and in the air and were unable to resupply even with the temporary capture of the city. Their long-awaited surrender removed one of the blights upon the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although a new invasion was threatened by a small Australian force, the Italian defenders traveling through Croatia to the Greek front managed to hinder their advance long enough for Yugoslav units to come to their aid and destroy the interlopers.

Throughout the early stages of the war the Royal Yugoslav Army had suffered from a deficiency of men by trying to maintain a presence on both the Greek and Romanian fronts while also responding to the threat of invasion from the Adriatic. Even with hastily raised divisions filling some of the gaps, the resulting shuffle of men and supplies had led to headaches and losses as they were ferried from one crisis to the next, with potential disasters such a Romanian offensive into the Serbian heartland only prevented by providence. However, with the stabilizing of the Axis lines against Romania, it was now believed to be safe enough to divert the men necessary to crush the British forces occupying Yugoslavia’s coastline. Twenty-four divisions of infantry were assembled under the Nedić protégé General Momcilo Ojdanić and given the simple mission to extricate the British from the country. With a massive local superiority in men and guns, Ojdanić worked with a brutal methodical efficiency motivated by his past failings to prevent British landings. The lost territory in Montenegro was carved in half and then the British were surrounded and mercilessly hammered until they surrendered. Losses were high, higher than anticipated or desired, but the general had accomplished his task and all of Yugoslavia was free from foreign invaders. His work completed, Ojdanić’s force was reduced to six divisions assigned to garrison the ports of Yugoslavia and Italian Albania. That was judged to be sufficient to bar any further Allied landings and to crush anyone unlucky enough to succeed.

Even as the Royal Yugoslav Army engaged in new attacks designed to drive out the British invaders from the country, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was undergoing a change in leadership. Despite his history of bungled intrigues in Bulgaria, friendly pre-war attitude towards the British, and his conflicts with the Nedić brothers, Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović was elevated to the general staff. Such an appointment came over the objections of the Nedić’s, but with the support of Prince Paul and the Kingdom’s civilian leadership. While Mihailović’s Yugoslavist credentials were not well-established, his loyalty to the royal family and his popularity with the men serving under him was. It was hoped that raising his profile and responsibilities would help rein in the military by preventing an unimpeachable clique from forming around Milan and Milutin Nedić. In terms of doctrine, Mihailović looked towards the defense of the Yugoslav homeland, and planned for an orientation for the army and the territorial militias which would prevent any further British encroachments from the Adriatic coast. His appointment and conservative temperament contrasted sharply with the fast-paced developments in the war with the Allies in the coming spring.

On the last day of January 1940, the German foreign ministry announced that a state of war existed between the Swiss and German governments. Within hours, Switzerland had tendered membership in the British alliance and were moving against Axis positions in Germany, Italy, and occupied France. As promised, Yugoslavia declared war on Switzerland out of solidarity with her allies, but maintained all of her divisions on the Romanian, Greek, and Adriatic fronts.

Just as in other conflicts started by Berlin’s brashness, the Wehrmacht was not in a position to attack or defend against Switzerland when the war was declared. Italian forces were similarly tied up in trying to hold back the combined Anglo-French counterattack in France. As such, the Swiss were initially able to make a series of impressive gains, advancing to the northeast in order to try and link up with the French defenders and to the south towards the Mediterranean Sea with its promise of British supplies and reinforcements. If accomplished, this achievement would also leave the bulk of the Italian army cut off from Rome and could mean the annihilation of the most fearsome member of the Axis alliance.

Unfortunately for the Allied cause, the small Swiss army was unable to link up with any friendly reinforcements before the Axis answer came, and their advance fell short of the Mediterranean. Overstretched and far from home, Switzerland’s soldiers were beset by a hastily assembled coalition of Italian and German divisions which drove them back into Switzerland and then pushed further into the mountainous country.

Frustratingly, the frontline in France had settled into a renewed stalemate as the French forces were woefully short on men and material while the British preferred to concentrate on shoring up their position in the Mediterranean rather than assist the Pétain regime with recovering its country. Thus, despite a vast superiority to the Italians on paper, the Anglo-French coalition did not continue to press south, and Switzerland was left to find for itself.

The end result was hardly unanticipated. On April 11th, 1940, the Swiss Confederation had to surrender to the Axis forces and faced the prospect of an ethnolinguistic division of the country by the victorious Germans and Italians. The war suddenly seemed to be going in the Axis’ favor and flush with the taste of victory and the gold seized from Swiss banks, the Axis leadership paid fresh attention to knocking France out of the war.

While the Swiss were seeing their early gains evaporate in the face of mounting Axis resistance, Belgrade renewed the attack on Romania in order to lessen the alliance’s burgeoning list of threats. The order came on the feast day of St. Valentine with an attack on the valuable city of Galati enroute to Bessarabia and the border with the Soviet Union. General Depre was eager to take up the attack again after months of impasse in the region, and the presence of German divisions capable of holding the broader line against Romania allowed him to form a fist of six infantry divisions and punch through the Romanian’s defenses in the same flood of fire and steel which had characterized previous Yugoslav advances.

The Yugoslavs’ boldness was rewarded when they encircled four Romanian divisions on the coastline of the Black Sea. Learning from the mistakes of the opening of the fighting in Greece, Depre assigned only two divisions to eliminate the pocket, trusting in the Germans to keep the Romanian’s boxed in. The rest of his spearhead he drove onwards.

This display of initiative led to the elimination of the surrounded Romanians and the envelopment of four more divisions on Romania’s border with the Soviet Union. Communist observers were more than content to watch the reactionaries fight, and it was abundantly clear that the Romanians were outmatched. The Yugoslavs rode roughshod over the Romanian defenders and moved closer to eliminating their kingdom’s greatest rival to dominating the Balkans.

In a little under two month, the Valentine’s Day offensive launched by General Josef Depre’s section of the Royal Yugoslav Army had captured thirteen Romanian divisions and cut off Romania’s access to the Black Sea and its border with the Soviet Union. A lifeline still existed through Poland, but the noose was tightening around Romania’s neck and the Axis powers were only too happy to draw it tight.

During the bulk of the fighting, the Romanian government had evaluated Hungary as the more hostile force and dangerous threat to their territory and assigned defenders primarily to Transylvania. King Carol’s intransigence and the rapid Yugoslav advance in the rest of the country meant that the last holdouts of loyal Romanian forces were still fighting to keep the Hungarians out of the disputed region when the bell tolled for Romania’s war effort. Some divisions escaped to Poland, but much of the Romanian army dissolved into a disorganized rabble and blended in with the local population as the Axis armies advanced on Cluj from the west.

On April 20th, 1940, the Romanian government finally surrendered to the commander of the Yugoslav forces controlling the bulk of the country. King Carol fled abroad with his mistress, his ensemble, and as much wealth as they could carry with them, leaving a dejected Romanian government to submit itself to Belgrade’s mercies. The news was met in Yugoslavia with relief more than joy, although Radical Union-organized parades still took place in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Sarajevo, to name a few. The Swiss surrender had been a boon, but a far-off one, whereas the surrender of Romania meant that Yugoslavs could dare to believe that the war might be closer to ending. The capture of the Romanian army’s remaining stockpiles as well as the earlier encirclements of entire divisions put an end to many of the Royal Yugoslav Army’s shortage of rifles and other necessities of modern industrialized war.

In keeping with Hungarian demands, administration of the whole of Transylvania was ceded to Budapest, albeit not without some grumbling from the more arrogant members of the Yugoslav General Staff. The region of the Banat, remained under Belgrade’s control until the status of that region, and the rest of Romania, could be decided. The Hungarians were loathe to press this particular issue at the time, and instead concentrated on reclaiming their prize of Slovakia from Poland.

The weeks leading up to Romania’s surrender had seen the fourth largest army in the Allied coalition destroyed outright and the jubilant Germans and Hungarians were free to move against the Polish Republic which had been the Allies’ anchor in the east by taking back Slovakia and even invading parts of Germany proper. Now, the Poles were on the defensive, as the Polish-Romanian frontier turned into a deadly additional front to maintain. Meanwhile, the divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army which had broken Romania’s back were directed towards a different area of the war in hopes that they could repeat their performance in the Balkans.

The Fall of France

“Thank God for the French army.” – Winston Churchill

The build-up of Allied forces in northern France did not seem nearly as threatening once the state of the French army was revealed to Axis war planners. The French, having suffered a fighting retreat across much of their country, were running low on men and low on guns. The losses of the First Great War had not yet been overcome before the country had been thrown into another epochal conflict. The French leadership was still plodding and conservative compared to their continental foes, and had been particularly caught off-guard by the rapid Italian advance into the French heartland. Many of the generals held their positions owing to a combination of lingering reputation from the previous conflict and adept political maneuvering through their country’s political upheavals throughout the interwar period. When the Italians began a fresh drive to the north, the mood was one of despair rather than defiance.

Both the British and the Germans appeared to view the fate of France as a foregone conclusion, with both Saxon powers redeploying forces out of France to what was thought to be the next major battlefield in the war for Europe – the Low Countries. As such, the fighting in France became a contest between French experience and Italian energy. Ultimately, the adage proved true, and the Italians, being better supplied, had the final bullet in their chamber.

The Italians were not fighting alone, however. Fresh from securing the Adriatic coastline and forcing a Romanian surrender, fourteen infantry divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army were ordered west under the command of the military’s rising star, General Josef Depre. As the men rode rails through Italy, Germany, and occupied France, it was sobering experience of what war could wrought, but also how far behind Yugoslavia was economically compared to the Great Powers. For many of the soldiers, it was their first time outside of the Balkans, and the Italians initially regarded them as useful auxiliaries at best, fit only for garrison and anti-partisan duties. This attitude did not last long.

In the battleplan which the Yugoslavs had devised with their Italian counterparts, the task of holding the general line against the French would fall on the former while the fresh Yugoslav units were to serve as a wedge designed to exert maximum pressure on the overstretched French defending Paris. The brutal math of local superiority and ample supplies of fresh guns and men granted the Royal Yugoslav Army the power to punch through the French lines and begin the first stages of what was soon to become a general rout.

The French army was in dire straits with many of its units hardly existing outside of paper (AN: as you can see from their low supply and manpower)

The spearhead of the Yugoslav infantry broke through the exhausted French defenders and swooped towards Paris and towards the English Channel. Frantic efforts to reinforce the French lines were stymied by the simple lack of men available. The near-total abandonment by Britain of her French ally had caused the Allied presence in the country to evaporate almost overnight. Increasingly, French soldiers surrendered en masse, not only to the advancing Yugoslavs but also to the Italians who they had been alternatively fighting and staring down for months. The reputation of the Royal Yugoslav Army, already recovering from successful operations in the Balkans, climbed again in the view of foreign observers as the remains of the once-mighty French army were driven back again and again by Belgrade’s loyal soldiers.

As the Yugoslavs advanced on Paris, the Pétain government declared the capital to be an “open city” and ordered it opened to the advancing Axis forces while the Marshal’s loyalists fled to Calais, either to wait for renewed British aid or to prepare for peace terms if such help did not materialize. The declaration spared Paris from aerial or artillery bombardment, and the Yugoslav forces entered the city in awe of their surroundings. Although they had advanced under the auspices of Italian command, and the city was hurriedly handed over to Italian control, it was still an impressive feather in the cap for the Royal Yugoslav Army. The social and military reforms undergone by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in only a few short years seemed to have paid off handsomely, and the reception of the news in Belgrade was ecstatic among all but the most bitter opponents to Prince Paul and his government.

Still, Benito Mussolini was eager to claim the triumph for Italy, and, given the sacrifices and heroism of the Italian forces who had brought France to her knees, there was no opposition to letting the Duce have the glory. The Italian leader flew to an airfield just outside of Paris and entered the city on a white horse in a display far more grandiose than anything enjoyed by Alexander II and the other conquerors of Napoleon. Italy had succeeded where Germany had failed in the last war, but fortunately for relations between the two countries, Mussolini did not dwell on that point. Instead, swept away by his own ego and the moment, he delivered a bombastic address under the Arc de Triomphe in which he proclaimed that Italy was destined for even greater victories than this one.

While the Italians celebrated, drank, and outdid themselves in trying to impress the local women, the Yugoslavs continued to advance, chasing north after the French government in order to bring the fighting to an end.

When London had coolly responded to French entreaties, Pétain’s advisors had bent to the inevitable and opened negotiations for their country’s surrender to the Axis forces. While isolated fighting still occurred, primarily with the few British units unlucky enough to still be stationed in northern France, the path to Calais was left open for the advancing Yugoslavs, and they were met not with gunfire but with the flag of truce. While the official surrender was to the Italian commander in the area, the leadership in Belgrade was satisfied with the knowledge that Yugoslavs had once again helped to bring this horrible war closer to an end.

Negotiations for an armistice began as soon as Italian and German plenipotentiaries arrived, and the world would be changed once again.

With the fall of France, Belgium and the Netherlands came under renewed pressure as the Germans deployed to push the Dutch invaders out of the rich industrial centers of the northwest while the fourteen divisions of the Yugoslav Royal Army which had secured the French surrender worked on mopping up stranded British units in the area before redeploying to protect the still-reeling French State from any counterattack from Belgium. The bulk of the Belgian and Dutch armies had been concentrated against the German threat, and the rapid exit of France from the war left the west woefully undefended. A few reinforcements from the British Empire helped to shore up defenses in the region, but Brussels and Amsterdam had the unenviable choice between leaving the west vulnerable to invasion by the Italians and Yugoslavs or weakening defenses in the east just as Germany was preparing to reclaim the losses of late 1939.

The Soviet Factor

With the exit of France from the picture, British war planners were left scrambling to try and make up the deficit in their alliance. Although the war against the Axis, much like that against the Central Powers, had been sold to the British public as being in the defense of small powers, it was obvious to London that an alliance which placed its hopes on the shoulders of Greece and Lithuania was not long for this world. Accordingly, Winston Churchill’s plans for pressuring the governments of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to declare for the allied side continued. The pressure caused those countries’ governments to lean more heavily on the Soviet Union for support, which in turn increased British anxieties about the region and led to more cajoling and threats from Whitehall.

One salve for the Allied generals in the west was the continued diversion in German attentions posed by the fighting against Poland in the east, but the war was rapidly turning against Warsaw. The loss of Romania as an ally and the shifting of Hungarian divisions to southern Poland had seen the initial Polish successes rolled back and soon the Poles had not only been pushed out of Slovakia but also were ceding ground in Galicia and Silesia. Some assistance was forthcoming from Estonia and Latvia, but the Lithuanians were proving frustratingly reluctant to contribute forces to the defense of Poland owing to lingering hostility and territorial claims between the two countries. For the time being, the Poles still held onto Danzig and its valuable access to the sea, but the wages of war were coming due, and another threat loomed on the horizon.

Inspired by the sudden reversal of the war in Europe, Stalin and his subordinates moved quickly to turn their diplomatic attentions to the west, even as a large portion of the Soviet military remained bogged down in Siberia and China. The fall of France meant that the British were hungry for allies, and Stalin was prepared to offer his assistance, for the right price. Moscow’s ambitions in the Baltic region were well-known, but with Romania’s surrender to the Axis powers, the Soviet diplomatic corps upped the ante. In exchange for the Soviets pulling British chestnuts out of the fire, it would be necessary for Romania to forfeit the Bessarabia region which had been seized from the convulsing Russian Empire during its dissolution and civil war. Bucharest would object, certainly, but with Hungarian and Yugoslav troops occupying the country they were in no position to veto British policy.

Desperate for an ally capable of bringing the Axis to heel, the British government was prepared to make a deal with the devil himself. Proposals were floated for British assistance in the Pacific against the Japanese Empire and for hefty supplies of financial and military aid, most of which would have to be obtained in turn from the Americans. Such desperation only encouraged Stalin to broaden his demands.

The Polish Republic, once the great hope in the east for the Anglo-French alliance had suffered the most from the fall of France and Romania, as British supplies and divisions were unable, or unwilling, to travel through the dangerous waters of the North and Baltic Seas to aid Warsaw. As Hungarian and German forces made rapid advances over the Polish plain, the threat of Yugoslav reinforcements for the Axis onslaught seemed to spell Poland’s doom. For fear of being deprived a theater in the east, the British were prepared to sell out their ally of convenience in favor of the Soviet Union. Stalin had already made his intentions in eastern Poland known, a reversion back to the post-war Curzon Line drawn itself by His Majesty’s government. With London’s acquiescence, Moscow prepared an ultimatum to be delivered to the teetering Polish state: hand over the contested territories and receive Soviet assistance, or refuse and be destroyed.

The only question was whether the cogs in the Soviet system, ever fearful of offending the Red Tsar in the Kremlin, would act in time for there to be a Polish government left to receive the missive.

The Armistice at Calais

The French army had fought valiantly as it had in the First Great War, but the first half of 1940 had seen the countries of the Axis powers claw their way back from the edge of defeat. Efforts to relieve Switzerland and support Swiss forays into German and Italian territory had proven foolhardy and divided the attention of the French army even as Mussolini’s legionaries were rallying. Exhausted, underfed, and undersupplied Pétain soon found his loyal armies in the same position that the Italians had been, retreating over familiar ground and passing the graves of fallen comrades in a headlong general retreat. It was a devastating turn of events, and the promise of more hardship to come colored the French government’s thinking.

Still, even the fall of Paris did not prompt the French surrender that many observers had expected. The French army had kept her bearings and held out just long enough for Pétain’s envoys to reach Mussolini’s ear. When an advance scout of Yugoslav infantrymen arrived in Calais, they had found the tired old general, the lion of Verdun, ready to surrender.

The British, naturally, were outraged at the negotiation of a separate peace with Axis forces, but with nearly all of France under Italian occupation and the British bogged down in the Adriatic and Greek theaters, relief from London did not strike Pétain’s inner circle as particularly likely. Furthermore, any British rescue would have not only been humiliating but would likely have forced a new government on the French people, with the generals and nationalists driving French policy beforehand denounced and shamed at best. Rome, on the other hand, was offering surprisingly lenient terms for a conquering power with delusions of grandeur.

Despite the lackluster performance of the Wehrmacht against France and Luxembourg, Benito Mussolini consented to Berlin’s annexation of Elsass-Lothringen and Luxembourg as a sop to German pride. Rome had been happy to tweak her ally’s nose in response to a reckless foreign policy and poor war-fighting, but the Italian government had no desire to create long-lasting enmity with the Teutons over French territory. For their part, the Germans begrudgingly accepted the gift and Mussolini managed to keep most of his crowing to private channels.

For Italy herself, Mussolini’s negotiators, led by the omnipresent Count Ciano, took Corsica and adjusted the Franco-Italian border further west so that the Alps no longer provided the French with an easy bulwark against invasion. Italian military planners knew that it was only the fear of German arms which had allowed for their initial penetration of France’s southern frontier, and it was important to keep the road to Paris an easy one. There were hopes for reconciliation and cooperation between the two Latin powers, but in the event that such a rapprochement failed, Rome would keep her options open. For this reason, while Savoy and the Alps were brought fully under Italian administration the fate of Provence with its rich port of Marseilles was kept in a legal limbo as a further incentive for French cooperation with Italian wishes. Despite his speech in Paris, it seemed as though the man who had long blustered about recreating Rome had learned a lesson or two about prudence.

Under the terms agreed to between Rome and Paris, Marshall Phillipe Pétain’s government would remain in place, although its foreign policy and military would be subject to Axis oversight until such a time as it was believed that France was ready to stand on her own two feet again. The other chief change to the French government included in the terms negotiated by Count Ciano was the requirement that Petain hand over his duties as the French head of state to a legitimate French king. The negotiators bandied about a few names, but there was little doubt that they would settle upon the infirm Prince Jean, Duke of Guise, as monarch with his son, the Count of Paris serving as regent for his ailing father. It was held by both sides that the institution of a monarchy, while initially divisive, would provide the French with a unifying institution which would survive Marshal Pétain, who was himself undergoing health issues. Other issues abounded, and many were put off until the negotiation of a final peace treaty, including the size of the bill of reparations which France would have to pay her conquerors.

Owing to the presence of Yugoslavs in Calais, there were actually more representatives from Belgrade than from Berlin at the armistice negotiations, and none from Budapest. The Germans in general felt as though they were not consulted by Mussolini in his egotism and desire for a peace which he could claim almost wholly as his own. The Italians were unsympathetic and responded to the effect that the Germans should have performed better on the battlefield if they wanted more seats at the table.

In Northern Africa, the Italians were happy to add the long-desired Tunisia to their colonial empire. Surprising many observers, however, Mussolini was content to leave Paris in control of Algeria and French Morocco. Algeria in particular was seen as integral to the French sense of self-worth as a nation, being considered closer to the metropole than any mere colony. Letting the French maintain control over Morocco gave Mussolini a valuable buffer between British machinations in the Atlantic and also was believed to give the French another reason to be grateful for Rome’s lenient peace. Besides, Count Ciano argued in a letter to his father-in-law, the Duce, Britain’s inevitable surrender would mean Gibraltar and the Suez Canal falling under Rome’s control. Mastery of the Mediterranean did not need to mean owning every last grain of sand on its beaches, but rather the chokepoints upon which the region’s destiny depended.

Further evidence of Mussolini’s restraint could be seen in the way in which French territory in Africa was assigned. Italy took the Red Sea port of Djibouti for herself as well as most of France’s colonies which lie between the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean. The former German colony of Togoland was included in Rome’s gains in exchange for a much-enlarged German East African colony centered on the restored German colony of Kamerun. France was afforded Senegal and promised the Gambia as well once the British accepted peace terms as well.

Ultimately, the acquisition of territory in Africa served two purposes. The first was prestige, but the second was as a supply of assets which could be used in horse-trading over the final peace. Hardly any of the territory divided between Germany, Italy, and France was economically self-sufficient, but they still had value insofar as they could be offered up during the negotiation of the final peace settlement at the end of the war.

As a further incentive for keeping France bound to her new Axis patrons, Paris was permitted to maintain its hold on Indochina with its rich bounty of rubber, its extensive missionary community, and its restless population of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. Besides serving as a salve to French pride, the failure of the Germans or Italians to occupy the region owed to the long distance between Europe and Indochina, traversing which would mean navigating hostile British-controlled waters. Furthermore, even as the war in Europe had turned against Paris, a sizable garrison and administrative network had been maintained in Hanoi to keep order and deter a Japanese attack on the colony. As long as Japan and Siam continued to threaten the region for its valuable rubber plantations and proximity to the relocated Chinese capital of Nanning, it was believed that France would be more than willing to placate Rome and Berlin so that they might serve as a shield against Japanese ambitions.

Tokyo’s ambassadors in Europe argued that this was a violation of the terms of the Tripartite Pact between their country, Italy, and Germany. Rome responded that, since no territory was changing hands in East Asia, there was nothing for the three revisionist powers to discuss. The move solidified the new alliance between Japan and Siam - anti-French ambitions had brought them together, and their alliance grew stronger due to the "theft at Calais".

Other holdings of the French Empire which were far from Axis control and had ties to neighboring powers did not remain under Paris’ control nor pass into the grasping hands of the Axis powers. Instead, French India was seized by the British Raj while the Guangzhouwan region of China and French legations elsewhere in China were snapped up by Li Zongren’s Chinese government. Along similar lines, the United States took over French colonies in the Caribbean while Australia occupied French islands in the South Pacific. The civil servants and French nationals in those regions did not put up a fight, but instead sought merely to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives as best they could.

With France, Czechoslovakia’s great protector, suing for peace and the Romanian government in a similar state of collapse, Germany and Hungary formally moved to divide up the conglomerated state. Bohemia and Moravia became a nominally self-administering protectorate of the German Reich while the German-majority areas of Czechia such as the Sudetenland were annexed outright. Hungary regained control over Slovakia and Ruthenia which had been under Budapest’s control during the days of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The decision by Slovak nationalists led by Father Jozef Tiso to petition Poland for aid left Adolf Hitler cold to their pleas for independence. Instead, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Rusyns found themselves under Hungarian rule and the promise of renewed Magyarization loomed on the horizon. Some maintained hope in a Polish victory, but such an outcome seemed more and more remote with every passing day.

While Mussolini and his advisers were largely able to dictate the terms of peace outside of Central Europe to the other parties, the situation in the Middle East took Rome by surprise. An indigenous group of Arab nationalists, taking partial inspiration from German National Socialism, had risen up and declared an independent Arab state in Syria. The French had put down revolts in the area before, but after a brief resistance, accepted their eviction from Syria and Lebanon. Mussolini was frustrated that his plans to establish an Italian foothold in the Middle East were thwarted, but his hand was stayed by Berlin. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party found a willing sponsor in the German National Socialists not only for ideological reasons but also because building such a relationship was seen as a way to counteract Italian influence and build German influence in the pivotal region. Indeed, while Mussolini and his loyal French government were keeping Arab subjects under their heels, Hitler promised support for Arab nationalism, fulfilling the promises of the First World War. All that Antun Saddeh and his Syrian National State had to do was to bring the fight against the British in the Middle East.

Saddeh himself was not entirely sold on hitching the star of Syrian independence to Germany, but he was pragmatic enough to accept the help that was offered. With a country already encompassing Syria and Lebanon, Saddeh and his supporters had grandiose plans for linking up with nationalists in Iraq and freeing the Fertile Crescent from foreign domination.

The republican form of the fledgling Syrian government continued a trend in which the Fascist states which were aligned more closely with Berlin had a more republican character while those who leaned towards Rome were nominally ruled by a king.

With the Armistice at Calais bringing France into the alliance as a ward of Italy, the Axis was in control of an impressive amount of territory, including much of Europe and African and Middle Eastern holdings which further challenged Britain’s mastery of the Mediterranean. The Low Countries, Poland, and the Baltics still held out in the north, and Greece and Egypt in the south, but the trends seemed to be favoring the Berlin-Rome alliance, and desperate measures would be needed to reverse the trend in the Allies’ fortunes.

And what of Yugoslavia? By the middle of 1940, Yugoslavia was occupying much of Romania and parts of the Greek coastline, but against the defeated French Belgrade took nothing for herself. This restraint stood even in the face of Rome’s halfhearted offer of a protectorate in one of the African colonies which Italy had seized from Paris’s control. Yugoslavia, Ivo Andrić claimed, would be a sated power once all of her people were united in one nation. She had no desires for overseas colonies or bases, not when there was still so much work to do digesting the gains which she had already made. Such alleged disinterest, Prince Paul dared to hope in his diary, would allow Yugoslavia to serve as an honest broker between members of the alliance when disputes inevitably arose. The prince, however, seems to have forgotten that the man who popularized the phrase, Otto von Bismarck, was hardly regarded as an honest broker by anyone with whom he dealt.

[AN: Well, there you have it, the end of the French faction. I like to think that I portrayed a rather reasonable division of the spoils, but if anyone has any questions, objections or wishes to argue their case, we have the power to make changes. After all, in story terms, this is only an armistice, not the finalized treaty ]

 

[The Living Hive]

Chapter Sixteen: A Time to Gather Stones Together (June 12th, 1940 to November 4th, 1940)

The Surrender of the Low Countries

With the French government’s realignment with the Axis alliance, Belgium and the Netherlands were suddenly left in a very vulnerable position, surrounded by enemies on all sides save for the sea, and its promise of British help, at their backs. The first objective of the new Axis offensive against the two countries was therefore to cut them off from that aid. Accordingly, the Yugoslav divisions in Calais advanced along the Atlantic coast, buoyed by reinforcements from the rest of the country which had been freed up by the signing of the armistice with France. While Germans and Italians threatened Brussels, General Depre was able to punch his men through Allied lines and captured Antwerp and advanced on Amsterdam as well.

A few Dutch divisions raced to try and defend their capital from attack, but were delayed by diversionary attacks by grim-faced Yugoslav infantrymen. With the capture of Amsterdam on July 1st, 1940, what elements of the Dutch government were able to fled across the English Channel while their less-fortunate colleagues surrendered to the German military command. Again, the Yugoslavs oversaw the handover of power to an occupying power that wasn’t their own.

With the surrender of the Netherlands and her ports to German control, Belgium lost what remaining access she had to reinforcements and resupply. To the north, a small detachment of Belgians continued fighting from Wilhelmshaven, fending off enemy soldiers in desperate hope of reconnecting Brussels to the outside world, but the German, Italian, and Yugoslav armies prevented any breakout and worked meticulously to root out the remaining Allied divisions active in Belgium and the southern Netherlands.

Nearly two months of fighting changed little in the Lowlands, and General Depre was growing frustrated with the slow pace of the so-called “mopping up” operations. Pulling the divisions under his command to the area surrounding Brussels, Depre prepared a massive strike designed to knock out the Belgian capital and force a surrender of the intransigent little country. While German and Italian divisions launched ineffectual probing attacks on Allied lines in limited numbers, the Yugoslavs waited until the weather favored them and their supplies had been replenished. Then, like a wave they fell upon the Belgian capital and its defenders, three divisions from the British Raj which had become trapped on the continent following the Dutch surrender.

Three days later, it was all over. Brussels had fallen and the government had broadcast a call for the Belgian army to stand down. The country came under German occupation and the Yugoslav leadership, at least, breathed a collective sigh of relief. The difference between the war’s development at the start of the year and the situation at the end of the summer was wildly different. The brazen German declarations of war had somehow been managed and rather than facing a sizable coalition of hostile powers, the Axis powers now faced a much smaller field of foes, chief among which remained the British Empire.

Belgrade, and General Depre, was already looking ahead to the next assignment for the general’s troops, awash as they were with the praise of a grateful government and the first inklings of hero worship among the Yugoslav public, fanned in no small part by the kingdom’s eager propagandists. First, however, there was the matter of dealing with the few straggling Indian soldiers who had been left behind by their government. Upon their capture or surrender, many were turned over to Berlin, where the German military leadership had plans to craft a weapon to use against the British Empire out of its disgruntled subjects. Such schemes did not interest Prince Paul or the General Staff in Belgrade. Their attention was turned instead to Greece, where the next chapter of the Royal Yugoslav Army would be written.

The Treaty of Grodno

The focus on Greece came in part due to a decree from the German high command that the Yugoslavs were not needed in Poland. While part of the statement was certainly rooted in the desire to limit the distribution of spoils in Eastern Europe, it was also grounded in the reality that the Germans and Hungarians had the war in the east well in hand. The Polish army had been pushed back to the outskirts of Warsaw, and it was believed that only another miracle could save the city from falling to the determined German and Hungarian attackers. The most desperate for deliverance from the Axis looked to the Soviet Union and its ultimatum for Polish territory. Perhaps there was still time to negotiate a peaceful handover of land to Moscow in exchange for military support? But the Polish government refused the ultimatum delivered by the Soviet envoy outright. With the German consulate remarking that any Soviet move into eastern Poland would be tantamount to an act of war against Germany and the British attitude towards the mood contradictory, Stalin and his government were content to sit back and leave the Poles to their fate.

On July 18th, 1940, while the fighting was still raging around Belgium and the unoccupied Netherlands, the news came that Warsaw had fallen to the Germans. While the Polish Army briefly pushed out the Axis forces, the city changed hands rapidly back to Axis control. Just over one month later, Danzig fell and the Polish government and people were forced to accept surrender. While the Italians and Yugoslavs had declared war on Poland and participated in some battles against them, Berlin was determined to reshape the face of Eastern Europe with the same unilateral approach that she accused Italy of taking in France and her colonies.

The results of the Treaty of Grodno, shown with German claims in Lithuania.

The result was the Treaty of Grodno, negotiated primarily by Germany and Poland but with representatives from the other Axis powers and the leaders of several ethnic movements which had been encouraged by the German advance. Poland’s defeat created a vacuum in Eastern Europe which Germany was eager to fill. The first priority was reclaiming the territory that the German Empire had been forced to cede after the First Great War. For twenty years German politicians of every stripe had agitated against the Polish Republic for the return of Germany’s eastern territories. Now, the German Reich encompassed the lost territories in Silesia and Prussia. The German drive to the east continued and the rich port city of Danzig was restored to Berlin’s control after being severed from the Fatherland by the Treaty of Versailles. Elements in the German government wanted to go even further, but they were stayed, despite sympathy coming from the Führer himself. Yugoslavia’s membership, and performance in, the Axis alliance had tempered much of the official enmity towards Slavs in the German leadership. Enmity towards the Slavs had been officially paused, if only for the practical reasoning that it was believed that, alongside placating Belgrade for the time being, the promise of some autonomy could help win allies among the Slavic peoples for the coming conflict with the Soviet Union.

The name for the policy of using national minorities to attack the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union which succeeded it was “prometheism” and it was in Poland under Marshal Józef Piłsudski that this strategy was most vigorously pursued. It was thus with no small degree of irony that Germany used a variation of this concept as the basis for the fracturing of the Polish Republic. Despite extensive lobbying efforts by the Polish negotiators, the multiethnic republic was to be divided up into more ethnically homogenous units. The concept of the Second Republic and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had preceded it serving as multiethnic states were roundly mocked and denounced. There was no room for such a creation in the Europe of nations which was being born, the Germans argued. They hinted darkly at the lack of loyalty felt by the non-Polish groups ruled by Warsaw, and forthcoming developments would seem to prove such intimations correct.

As a sop to the Poles, there was some lip service from the German negotiators paid to promises of future gains to be made at the expense of the Lithuanians, but at no time during the treaty talks did they ever let their Polish counterparts forget that Germany was in charge. For the immediate future, the shell-shocked Polish population had to scrape together a new government for their people and rebuild a society shattered by war in the territory of “natural Poland”, although they could at least count themselves lucky enough to retain Warsaw and Krakow after a proposal to simply push Poland’s borders to the east at the expense of the Soviet Union was roundly rejected. The first governor of the Polish General Government, the name given to the German protectorate over Poland, was headed by Bolesław Piasecki, a veteran and pre-war nationalist politician heading the Polish Falangist movement whose war-time efforts fighting the Germans had given him a degree of nationalist credibility. His Falangist movement, while moderately popular among the Poles, was seen as potentially too close to Rome owing to its Catholic character and as ultimately expendable by their German enablers. If someone with a better claim to legitimacy or utility in the “pure Poland” of Berlin’s creation came along, then they had no small chance of seizing the governorship for themselves.

The new Poland was a landlocked country reeling from the losses. As a small sop to the distraught Poles, Germany pledged not to seek to raise any troops from among the General Government, although this promise, like every other pledge made during negotiations, was subject to further review if and when the situation changed.

If Poland was the chief victim of the Treaty of Grodno, Ukraine was one of its primary victors. The rump Protectorate of Ukraine carved out of southeastern Poland was a small country with its capital in Lwow, but it, and its German backers, harbored great ambitions for it to serve as the staging area for the defection and seizure of the vital farmlands of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Every effort was made by Berlin to create an alternative nationalism which would inspire the Ukrainian subjects of the Soviet Union to rise up and welcome Axis forces as liberators in the inevitable clash between Berlin and Moscow. To that end, the country’s new president and head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Stepan Bandera was given far-reaching powers to shape his new state to his heart’s desire, provided that he prove ultimately loyal to Berlin and useful in the destruction of the Soviet Union.

The rebirth of a Ukrainian nation after its death during the Russian Civil War inspired hope among ardent Pan-Slavists in Yugoslavia, many of whom had shed the label after the last war and were only now coming to embrace it again. However, Bandera’s agitation for territory in Romania and the terror his government inflicted in order to whip his countrymen into fighting shape for the coming war of liberation left a sour taste in the mouths of Prince Paul and others in Belgrade’s government. The hatred the Ukrainian ultranationalists harbored not only towards Communism but towards Poles and Russians, their fellow Slavs, was unnerving and deflated hopes that a peaceful and united Slavic community might emerge after the war.

With less fanfare and drama than in Ukraine, the Treaty of Grodno also reestablished a Belarusian state out of the ashes of the Second Polish Republic. The Belarusian Central Council and its president Radasłaŭ Astroŭski served as the official government of the new state claiming legitimacy as the successor to the short-lived Belarusian People’s Republic, but since they were lacking in the experience and membership of either the Polish Falange or the Ukrainian OUN, German administrators took on a much greater role in guiding the young state’s policies. Like Ukraine and the rump Poland, the new Belarus was a landlocked state, dependent on Germany militarily, economically, and politically yet also harboring greater ambitions. The mercurial Astroŭski had been promised the annexation of the territory and people of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, should he prove cooperative and his countrymen acquit themselves well in the coming fighting. For the former school teacher who had flirted with support for the Polish Republic and Communism as well as the Axis powers, it was an easy promise to make though not, perhaps such an easy one to deliver on.

Although it lay beyond the reach of German armies, the losses suffered by Estonian troops in fighting the Axis occupation of Poland had left its government on the defensive against an outraged and war-weary population. The government of Estonian strongman Konstantin Päts fell due to strikes and demonstrations which the Estonian military was unwilling and unable to put down. With Päts stepping down, the nationalist veterans’ organization Vaps was able to successfully secure German backing for a new Estonian government on the basis of its anti-Communism, its past repression under the previous regime, and its strong military character. The average Estonian saw the rule of one man replaced with the rule of a smaller coterie of Vaps members, nominally led by interim president and first among equals Pent Vilms. The Estonians were tired of fighting other countries’ wars, and the new government promised them peace, but it was a promise that was predicated on German access to Estonian as a staging area for operations against the Soviet Union, and it was a promise which could be abrogated by the Germans at any time of their choosing.

The final member of the Polish alliance and party to the Treaty of Grodno was Latvia. Unlike Poland she did not suffer occupation by the Axis powers, and unlike in Estonia her government was stable enough to survive the loss of a generation of young men in fighting. Conscious of Soviet designs on his country and appealing to an absence of current or historical grievances between Latvia and Germany, President Kārlis Ulmanis approached Berlin with a pledge of neutrality in exchange for maintaining his country’s independence. Playing to the hilt his role as the self-proclaimed leader of the Latvian people, Ulmanis made a personal entreaty to Adolf Hitler to accept Latvian friendship and support for the construction of a peaceful and united Europe on the basis of the true principle of nationalities. It was so much bleating to the leader of an industrial and military juggernaut, but the Führer's advisors convinced him that discretion was the better part of valor and that attention was better spent planning on the coming war with the Soviet Union than on crushing an insignificant little statelet which would fall into Berlin’s orbit by sheer gravity.

British Perfidy

Following the surrender of Poland and her Baltic allies, the new order in Eastern Europe placed Lithuania in a strikingly vulnerable position. The government of Antanas Smetona had gambled on a British victory in Europe and boldly invaded East Prussia while German armies were occupied with the numerous other fronts opened by the Reich’s leadership in Berlin. But with the fall of Kaunas’ allies across the continent, the situation for the small Baltic country grew more and more dire. The long-standing hostility between Lithuania and Poland exacerbated the military situation as both powers steadfastly refused to cooperate in the face of mounting German pressure. Some of the more delusional among the Lithuanian leadership believed that Poland’s defeat would enable them to reclaim the long-sought after Vilnius, but the more realistic understood that Lithuania’s survival could now be measured in days.

Indeed, it was on September 10th that Lithuania capitulated to the German forces overrunning the country. While the defeated Poland and her allies had been treated harshly, a striking amount of venom had been reserved for Lithuania as one of the first countries to reject German demands and for the brazen seizure of East Prussia when Germany’s fate looked most uncertain. Accordingly, plans were drawn up not only for the reintegration of the Memel region but also for the handing over of power to local Baltic German notables with plans to resettle German colonists in Lithuania to supplement their numbers. It was a rude awakening for the little country which had thought itself so mighty.

As the Lithuanians were being routed, further south the situation in Greece took on a similar cast for the remaining Allied governments. The stalemate in the Balkans looked set to give way as the Axis forces enjoyed reinforcements from the closed theaters elsewhere in Europe while the British troops augmenting the Greek defenders had largely pulled out of the region. The Greeks were hardy defenders protecting their homeland from invasion, but they were also now strikingly outmanned and outgunned.

The Yugoslavs decided to seize upon the moment, with General Petar Kosić roused from his stasis to direct an attack on a small group of Greek defenders. The rush of Yugoslav soldiers and the hail of artillery fire gradually broke the entrenched enemy positions and left the rest of the Aegean coast vulnerable to an Axis advance, as well as a small pocket of Greek divisions. The previous strategy of thoroughly eliminating encircled enemy divisions had resulted in ample time for the Greeks to redeploy to new defensive positions, but Belgrade was not going to let Kosić make that mistake a second time. A token force of two divisions was assigned to keep the Greeks west of Thessaloniki bottled up while the rest of the Royal Yugoslav Army’s men in the theater drove towards the grand prize of Athens.

Instead of shoring up the faltering Greeks, the British admiralty had opted to try and draw Axis forces away from the region by launching a naval invasion dangerously close to Naples and Rome. While the incursion was rapidly put down by Italian divisions stationed on the peninsula, the attack reinforced the Adriatic Sea’s vulnerability. In response, Belgrade moved several factories to the production of the new naval bombers designed with Italian assistance. The decree authorizing the change argued that “the defense of our nation’s territorial waters is of the utmost importance to Yugoslavia’s development as an independent power”.

The brief invasion of Italy did not succeed in slowing the Axis advance into Greece and by early October much of the country, including Athens, had fallen. This occurred despite the brave efforts of the Greeks and their allies from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet the British were conspicuous in their absence in the final defense of Greece. Where were the British divisions? The world wondered.

In spite of the enemy occupation of much of their country, the Greeks refused to give up and fought a desperate defense to hold open the western ports for as long as possible to allow the Greek government and civilian refugees time to escape to the relative safety of Crete and Cyprus enroute to British holdings further away from the warzone. It was only a matter of time before they fell, but they continued to fight and fight hard, earning them the grudging respect of their foes, with less respect coming from the Italians and more from the Yugoslavs. “If the Greeks had the manpower and industry of Germany,” Prince Paul remarked in a meeting with the General Staff, “then they would command the world.”

Setbacks Outside of Europe

While the British were drawing down forces on Europe, the Allied leader spent much of the second half of 1940 advancing on fronts where the Royal Navy could interdict Axis troop movements. Desperate for victories to feed to a war-weary public, London quickly masterminded a scheme in the Middle East to bring the newly independent Syrian Republic to heel. Only weeks old and cut off from her German backer by land and by sea, the young Arab state was unable to mobilize an army capable of stemming a British advance from colonies in Palestine and Jordan. While some noises were made about self-government and the prospect of returning to French rule seemed highly unlikely, the Syrian population did not accept the entreaties of the British to lay down their weapons and accept the presence of foreign troops. Even after Damascus had been captured in early July, the government of Antun Saddeh and his Social Nationalist Party refused to surrender. They sought refuge among their countrymen and directed a resistance which united many of the wavering elements among their disparate people. The British had won the war on the field, but between their campaigns against British bases and isolated troop detachments the Syrians were behaving less like a civilized nation which had lost a war than an unruly group of savages. Winston Churchill, chief among British MPs, declared that they should be treated accordingly.

Even further afield than the Middle East, the forces of the world-spanning British Empire were able to operate with impunity. The Armistice at Calais may have left the French in control of Indochina, but the British refused to acknowledge the recognizance of the French government and troops from the British Raj crossed the colonial boundary between Burma and Laos and began advancing into Tonkin with designs on Cambodia and Annam as well. There was plenty of hue and cry from Paris, but little could be done. The war in Europe was the pivot on which it all turned. Bringing Britain to heel at her home islands would set the world right.

As Greece looked set to surrender to the Axis forces hammering the country, the war planners’ attentions turned to the next front of the war: North Africa. The contest for the Mediterranean between Italy and Britain had not yet concluded with the British still in control of Gibraltar and Suez, preventing the Italian navy from linking up with the French and German fleets to threaten the English Channel and Britain proper. While the Axis powers had won the battle in Europe, North Africa was largely under control of Britain, but Mussolini and his generals looked to alter the balance.

To that end, on September 1st, 1940 an expeditionary force of Yugoslav divisions was assigned to supplement the Italian efforts to regain control over Libya and threaten the British hold on Egypt, with far-off hopes of liberating the Holy Land and rescuing the Syrian government from under London’s boot. Italians were the tip of the spear and the top commanders of the North African front while the Yugoslavs worked to secure supply lines, root out British or indigenous resistance to Rome’s authority, and otherwise ensure that there would be no unpleasant surprises or reversals to mar the march of Mussolini’s legionnaires. It was not a thankless task, and the Italian officers and enlisted men were largely grateful for the assistance provided to them by their Balkan allies, but after the glamor of Paris and northern France, marching through the Libyan desert was a rude awakening. No one felt that disconnect more sharply than General Josef Depre, who had expected Belgrade to celebrate him as a hero but now had been assigned to a hostile clime and what he regarded as a secondary theater due to the jealousies he inferred among the Yugoslav general staff. Making matters worse, the already-frustrated general suffered from heatstroke shortly after a few straggling British divisions were eliminated outside of Gabès. He was still recovering from his illness at the start of November as the Axis marched to Egypt seemingly unopposed.

On the other side of the globe, startling developments were taking place in the United States. Communist influence was growing by leaps and bounds in America, fueled more naturally by concerns about domestic economic and social injustices and the threat of war abroad, but also by funds supplied by fellow travelers in the Roosevelt administration. Browder had grown bold enough to organize marches in several major cities calling for the U.S. to do more to support Britain and especially the Soviet Union in their wars with the revisionist powers. Although nominally organized under the guise of an American “popular front”, it was obvious to all but the most naïve of observers that the Communists were becoming more and more a prominent part of political life in America. With the 1940 presidential elections rapidly approaching, some of Roosevelt’s advisors urged him to crackdown on Browder and the CPUSA while others viewed the mass movement as a useful tool to organize voters while simultaneously casting the administration and its policies in a more moderate light. Whatever decision the president and his inner circle pursued, it was certain that a backlash was growing among both the elites and many of the common people in America who watched the explosion of a homegrown Communist movement with no small deal of trepidation. Those looking for a distraction from the fighting in Europe and in Asia found it in the fierce contest for the destiny of the United States.