Weaknesses
Despite being the best-armed and having the best logistics and infrastructure of all the domestic military formations in the World War II Balkans, the Croatian Home Guard failed to become an efficient fighting force for a variety of reasons.
One reason was a chronic lack of artillery and heavy weapons, despite repeated promises to remedy the situation by Germany and Italy. Another, more immediate reason was the lack of professional officers. Although initially significant numbers of ethnic Croat officers from the old Yugoslav army joined the Croatian Home Guard, most not entirely voluntarily, they were mistrusted by the new Ustasha puppet regime. Instead, the higher ranks were filled by presumably more reliable former Austro-Hungarian officers. Those men were older, retired and generally had little knowledge of modern warfare. NDH authorities tried to remedy this by forming officer schools and having junior staff trained in Italy and Germany, but effects of this policy came too late to affect the outcome of the war.
The other, more practical, reason was the rivalry between the Croatian Home Guard and the Ustasha Militia (Croatian Ustaška vojnica), the less numerous but yet more reliable paramilitary formation. Those two formations never properly integrated their activities and the Militia was gradually taking more and more dwindling resources from the Home Guard.
Third and, arguably, most important reason, the gradual decline in support for the Ustasha regime among ethnic Croats, first fueled by the abandonment of Dalmatia to Italy, then by the prospect of Home Guard troops being used by the Germans as cannon fodder on the Eastern Front - a repeat of the same traumatic experience from the First World War. This process intensified while the prospect of the Axis powers, and NDH with them, losing the war was getting more certain. Domobrani dissention, over the sadistic policies of the Ustasha, led to the outright persecution, deportation, and murder of Home Guard soldiers within the Jasenovac concentration camp system.
Read more about this topic: Croatian Home Guard (Independent State Of Croatia)
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