Hitler never was able to suppress the Yugoslav guerrillas, despite quickly "taking Belgrade" and having massive and brutal forces in place.
GN: the complications of Hitler's effort are much greater than are supposed in the common notion of Serbs as antifascists and Croats as pro-fascists. (Most Croats were more anti-Serb than pro-fascist, which may seem subtle, but it matters.) For example, part of what was gong on was that Serbian anti-communists were pushed by the Italian fascists to attack the German Nazi/Croat operations (yet they had harbored the Croat leader before he went to direct operations on berhalf of the Nazis). And as I have mentioned the Nazis themselves were split about whether to back the Croats. All this suggests that *part* of the success of the Serbian resistance was due to incoherencies in the German/Italian plans, rivalries between German factions, rivalries between Italians and Germans, and splits as well in the various nationalities, for as I have also mentioned, the Croat anti-Serbian parties of the 1930s refused to cooperate with the Nazi occupation (at least the leadership, no doubt some of the underlings went over). Given this mishmosh it is not unsurprisng that some of the most effective resistance was in the Serbian parts of Croatia. And which was also a good place for an anti-Nazi Croat (Tito) to make some good relationships with Serbs.
I would more willingly believe that the Serbs are unbeatable, were it not that the Croat offensive, much weaker than NATO's theoretical potential, was resoundingly successful, even though the Serbs have been born bred and trained & equipped for mountain resistance, and that the Croats successfully asserted control in precisely one of the zones that was highly contested in WWII. By the standards of WWII the Croats should have gotten hopelessly bogged down. Why could they do in the mid-1990s what they couldn't do in the 1940s?
One may be for the war or against the war, my point here is that I'm not certain that the legendary tying down of 40 Nazi divisions is the correct historical precedent. Conditions would appear to be very different. The only way to test the hypothesis is to fight the bloody war. Whether one wants that or not is a separate issue from whether the WWII precedent of Serbian valor/efficacy is automatically applicable.
It should be noted that in anotehr venue, in the war against Iraq the "elite Republican Guard," battle tested in over a decade against Iran, was repeatedly represented in the media as a terrible foe. It got rolled over. Frankly I was quite surprised at how fast it collapsed, having followed the Iran-Iraq war with some attention. Perhaps, even the US military was surprised, given the numbers of body bags they shipped over ostensibly for shipping dead Yankees home. To use language from another list, Barkley: Non-ergodicity may be as much a principle to bear in mind in military forecasting as in economic. And why should it not be thus. Both represent the operations of social systems.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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