Customer Reviews

Axis Forces in Yugoslavia 1941-45 (Men-at-Arms)

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This book is excellant for the study of military history. People seem to be angry that the book does not explain the brutality of the NDH. Well, the book was not written to explain this. There are plenty of books for that subject. To speak of being slanted, those books do not explain the Armies of the Balkans as anything more than "Nazi Drones". To speak from an intellectual standpoint, I wanted to learn about the uniforms, officers, and internal workings of the Axis forces in Yugoslavia. I find this a big coincidence that this is also the title of the book. .... The NDH was a horribile fascist regime. I'm not denying this.But some people joined to make an Independant State of Croatia. Just the same as not all Germans were Nazis. .... This book is about military units, and in that regard, it is superb with excellant drawing, photos, and diagrams. Lets drop the propaganda, and political agendas, and study historical facts.

An interesting primer that illustrates the military garb of those units which collaborated with the Nazi German, Fascist Italian, Fascist Hungarian, and Royalist Bulgarian occupiers of WW 2 Yugoslavia. There are only a couple of drawbacks to this book. First, maybe because of the Croatian ethnicity of one of the authors and the illustrator, the absolute brutality of the NDH (Independent State of Croatia) is not really made clear to those new to the subject. Also, the portrayal of the Royalist Chetniks (ethnic Serbian and Montenegrin forces) as monolithic, and the instances of their collaboration as other than adhoc and incidental,is not entirley accurate. The biggest evidence against such charges against the Chetniks is the saving of over 400 Allied, mainly American, downed aircrewmen in the summer of 1944. Operation Halyard, as it was called, could not have been if the majority of Chetnik forces had not actively hid the airmen from the Fascist forces. Richard Felman, one of those Americans rescued thanks to the Chetniks, wrote an autobiography on the subject and campaigned for many years to have the complex history of the Chetniks accepted in the History field.

The book is one sided and does not describe the situation the way it really was.