Focusing on the wartime activities of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Axis-controlled Yugoslavia during World War II, this book chronicles American policy, plans for sending aid and agents, and the establishment of the first training bases in North Africa and the Mediterranean. OSS missions and field operations with the Chetniks and Partisans are cataloged and analyzed for the first time, along with OSS views on Yugoslav border claims against Italy and Austria, the OSS position on Slovenia in postwar Yugoslavia, and the role of Yugoslavs cooperating within the OSS.
Focusing on the wartime activities of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Axis-controlled Yugoslavia during World War II, this book chronicles American policy, plans for sending aid and agents, and the establishment of the first training bases in North Africa and the Mediterranean. OSS missions and field operations with the Chetniks and Partisans are cataloged and analyzed for the first time, along with OSS views on Yugoslav border claims against Italy and Austria, the OSS position on Slovenia in postwar Yugoslavia, and the role of Yugoslavs cooperating within the OSS.
Originally published in 1975. This book fills a gap in the historical knowledge of wartime Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Chetnik movement provides a better understanding of the various ways that important segments of the population, including members of the Yugoslav officer corps and Serb civilians, perceived and responded to the occupation. The partisans' ultimate success does not conceal the fact that during the greater part of the war, several armed groups, owing at least some sort of allegiance to Mihailovic, chose very different courses of resistance. The overriding question for Milazzo is how a movement whose leadership was in no sense pro-Axis found itself progressively drawn into a hopelessly compromising set of relationships with the occupation authorities and the Quisling regime. What was it about the situation in occupied Yugoslavia and the Serb officers' response to that state of affairs that prevented them from carrying out serious anti-Axis activity or engaging in effective collaboration? The author attends to the emergence, organization, and failure of the Chetniks, the regional particularities of the movement, and Mihailovic's efforts to establish his own authority over the widely scattered non-Communist armed formations. The author also discusses the domestic opposition to Tito and the complex reality of the national and political civil war in Yugoslavia.
Traversing the politics, economics, demography, and culture of the former Yugoslavia, John B. Allcock examines and makes sense of the region's troubled past and troubling present. Though many think of the Balkans as a uniquely troubled region, the author asserts that the continuities in Balkan history constitute the same processes of development that have occurred in other societies and are part of the ongoing process of global modernization.
"This book examines the emergence, implementation, crisis and the breakdown of the fourth (Kardelj's) constitutive concept of Yugoslavia (1974-1990), and relations between anti-statist ideology of self-management and the actual collapse of state institutions. Based on interviews with key members of former Yugoslavia's political elite, documents, and other primary sources, the book reconstructs the elite's motives and reasons for the actions that led to state collapse. Contrary to the dominant explanation of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the book argues that Yugoslavia did not collapse primarily because of the complexity of its ethnic structure, of changes in the international environment, or of a deep economic crisis. Although these factors provided the context in which the elite operated, it was the elite's perception of these problems that decisively influenced their decisions."--BOOK JACKET.
Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.
An in-depth look at a crucial, little-known World War II episode—the failed Allied policy in Yugoslavia and its ramifications in the Balkans and beyond Winston Churchill called it one of his biggest wartime failures—the shift of British and U.S. support from Yugoslavia's Draža Mihailovic and his royalist resistance movement to Tito and his communist Partisans. This book illuminates the complex reasons behind that failure through the incredible story of what has been called the greatest rescue of Allied airmen from behind enemy lines in World War II history, a rescue executed, incredibly, with minimal official support from the United States and none such support from Great Britain. Recounts an unknown chapter of World War II history and the single largest rescue operation of the war Starting with Serbia's tragedy and triumph in World War II through civil war in Yugoslavia during World War I, focuses on the history of the Balkans, a tragically misunderstood part of the world Sheds new light on the OSS-SOE relationship and manipulations of intelligence that profoundly altered policy decision making Reveals how failed Allied policy set the stage for Yugoslavia's breakup in the 1990s Details the wartime camaraderie of unlikely warriors who became fast friends, outcasts, and heroes in executing the rescue Written with the drama of a novel and the insight of serious history, Shadows on the Mountain is essential reading for anyone interested in World War II, European history, and the Balkans.
