Invasion and Armed Resistance
In March 1941, after a coup d'etat with British and Soviet help, King Peter II ousted the pro-Axis Prince Regent Paul. In April 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia and quickly defeated the Yugoslav army. The Communist Party decided to organize resistance against the invaders and on 10 April set up a war committee in Zagreb to prepare a war for ″national and social liberation″.
When Hitler began his invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, the Communists considered the moment opportune and issued a proclamation calling to the nations of Yugoslavia to resistance. Assisted by the British and the Americans, the Communist-led Partisans used guerrilla tactics to establish territories under their control, where they also introduced elements of socialist revolution, and used propaganda to popularize their aims. At the end of the Yugoslav People's Liberation War in 1945, the Partisans consisted of 800,000 soldiers under the leadership of 14,000 members of the Communist party.
Read more about this topic: League Of Communists Of Yugoslavia
Famous quotes containing the words invasion, armed and/or resistance:
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)