Yugoslav Partisans

Yugoslav Partisans

The Partisans or the National Liberation Army, officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, were a communist-led revolutionary and resistance movement in Yugoslavia during World War II. The Partisans were the military arm of the Unitary National Liberation Front (JNOF) coalition, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and represented by the AVNOJ (Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia), the Yugoslav wartime deliberative assembly. The commander of the Partisans was Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

The Partisans' primary goal was to create a communist state in Yugoslavia. To this end, the KPJ attempted to appeal to all the various ethnic groups within Yugoslavia, by preserving the rights of each group. The objectives of the rival resistance movement which emerged some weeks earlier, the Chetniks, were the retention of the Yugoslav monarchy, ensuring the safety of ethnic Serbian populations, and the establishment of a Greater Serbia through the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from territories they considered rightfully and historically Serbian. Relations between the two movements were uneasy from the start, but from October 1941 they degenerated into full-scale conflict. To the Chetniks, Tito's pan-ethnic policies seemed anti-Serbian, whereas the Chetniks' Royalism was anathema to the communists.

By late 1944, the total forces of the Partisans numbered 650,000 men and women organized in four field armies and 52 divisions, which engaged in conventional warfare. By April 1945, the Partisans numbered over 800,000.