Allied Yugoslavia: Serbian Great War Veterans and their Internationalist Ties

Abstract

In March 1941, Prince Paul, a reluctant regent of Yugoslavia since the assassination of his uncle, King Aleksandar Karadordevic, in 1934, signed his country up to the Tripartite Pact. Under the agreed terms, Paul promised that Yugoslavia’s neutrality in the Second World War would be advantageously slanted towards the Axis by allowing German military vehicles and weaponry to pass through Yugoslavia en route to help Mussolini’s faltering campaign in Greece. The terms, agreed after months of pressure by Hitler, were relatively lenient, but even this loose association with the Axis was unacceptable to many of Yugoslavia’s Serb population; Germany, after all, was a traditional foe. There were demonstrations against the signing on the streets of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, as protesters carried placards with slogans such as ‘Better War than Pact’ ( Bolje rat nego pakt ) and ‘Better the Grave than a Slave’ ( Bolje grob nego rob ). Then, on 27 March, a group of army officers, mainly from Yugoslavia’s air force, carried out a coup against Paul’s regime, deposing his regency and installing themselves in power. Winston Churchill was delighted with this development; the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) had been active in Yugoslavia for some months, cultivating pro-British and pro-Allied groups in Serbia with some success. 1 The British prime minister claimed that with the coup ‘the Yugoslav nation found its soul’. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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