Invasion of Yugoslavia - Losses

Losses

The losses sustained by the German attack forces were unexpectedly light. During the twelve days of combat the total casualty figures came to 558 men: 151 were listed as killed, 392 as wounded, and 15 as missing in action. During the XLI Panzer Corps drive on Belgrade, for example, the only officer killed in action fell victim to a civilian sniper's bullet. The Luftwaffe lost approximately 60 aircraft shot down over Yugoslavia, costing the lives of at least 70 aircrew. The Italian Army took heavy casualties in northern Albania from the Yugoslav offensive there, whilst the Italian Air Force lost approximately 10 aircraft shot down, with a further 22 damaged. The Hungarian Army suffered some 350 casualties (120 killed, 223 wounded and 13 missing in action) from the shelling by Yugoslav riverine forces of its frontier installations and in its attacks upon the Yugoslav frontier forces in Vojvodina, with one quarter of a Hungarian parachute 'battalion' becoming casualties when a transport aircraft filled with 30 troops went down during an abortive drop on 12 April.

The Germans took between 254,000 and 345,000 Yugoslav prisoners, excluding a considerable number of ethnic Croat, German and Hungarian who had been conscripted into the Yugoslav Army and who were quickly released after screening, and Italians took 30,000 more.

Approximately 1,000 army and several hundred air force personnel (including one mobile-workshop unit of six vehicles) escaped via Greece to Egypt.

In their brief fight, the Royal Yugoslav Air Force suffered the loss of 49 aircraft to Axis fighters and anti-aircraft fire, with many more damaged beyond repair. These losses had cost the lives of 27 fighter pilots and 76 bomber aircrew. 85 more aircraft had been destroyed on the ground by air attack, while many others had been destroyed or disabled by their own crews, or had crashed during operations, or in evacuation flights.

Despite these losses, more than 70 Yugoslav aircraft escaped to Allied territory, mostly to Greece, but eight Dornier and Savoia Marchetti bombers set course for the USSR, with four making it safely. Several dozen of the escapee aircraft were destroyed in a devastating strafing attack by the Italian air force on Paramitia airfield in Greece, with nine bombers and transports making it to Egypt. More than 300 operational, auxiliary and training aircraft were captured and passed on to the newly created Air Force of the Independent State of Croatia, Finland, Romania and Bulgaria.

The Italians captured most of the Yugoslav Navy (one of its four destroyers, the Ljubljana, had spent the campaign in dry-dock). However, another destroyer, the Zagreb, was blown up at Kotor by two of its officers to prevent capture and one of the British-built submarines and two MTBs succeeded in escaping to Alexandria in Egypt to continue to serve with the Allied cause. It should also be noted that a fourth destroyer was captured while under construction in the Kotor shipyard, the Split, but the Regia Marina was not able to finish her before the armistice in 1943. Eventually, she was recovered after the war by the Yugoslavians and completed under the original name. Ten Yugoslav Navy maritime patrol float-planes escaped to Greece, with nine making it to Egypt, where they formed a squadron under RAF command.