World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 139
territory into large military units. Previously, the divisions of the Yugoslav
Army had some three thousand combatants each, but they now numbered
ten thousand. It was therefore possible to create a broad front running from
Kraljevo, Čačak, Užice, along the Drina, the Drava, and the Danube rivers, up
to the Hungarian border and beyond, where Soviet and Bulgarian forces were
sent. From a tactical point of view, the front was compact only in the Srem
region, where heavy battles were fought with the Wehrmacht, which was with-
drawing from the Balkans with eight hundred thousand men, together with
three hundred thousand collaborationists. The Serb recruits, who had never
before held a gun, were not trained to face such an avalanche of highly efficient
men, even though it was clear that the fall of the Third Reich was near. Tito
decided to resist the German withdrawal more for political than for military
reasons, eager to show that he had a regular army at his disposal. The result was
a slaughter never forgotten nor forgiven by the Serbs. The “butchery of the Serb
youth,”^463 during which thirty-seven thousand young soldiers lost their lives in
the course of 175 days, was described in a poignant passage by Gojko Nikoliš in
his memoirs: “From the window of my office, between Nemanja and General
Ždanov streets, I am observing lines of peasants with coffins on their shoulders.
The old men and grandfathers are going to find their nephews and sons, broth-
ers and brothers-in-law. They dig them up in the cemeteries of Srem around
Vinkovci, Djakovo, Požega, Čazma.... Some of them are going up the Nemanja,
others are returning. The coffins of galvanized tin are whitish on the shoulders
of the old curved men. So for entire days, months, two years.”^464
Collaborationists in every region of Yugoslavia followed the events on the
Eastern front as an announcement of the coming Götterdämmerung. In Slove-
nia, where in autumn 1944 there were eighteen thousand Domobranci (col-
laborationist Home Guards), who had been used by the SS as auxiliary troops,
the collective feeling of defeat was eloquently expressed by a priest who, cele-
brating the funeral of a group of the fallen on 6 October, declared: “For the
Slovenian people, it is better to die heroically than to live under the commu-
nist curse.”^465 In the Independent State of Croatia, some leaders of the ruling
regime had contacted the representatives of the Croat Peasant Party during the
summer, hoping to save themselves with their aid. The plan was that they
would stage a putsch to rid themselves of the Ustaše thugs and ally the Domo-
brani (members of the regular army) with the Chetniks, hoping that, in the
meantime, the English and Americans would have landed in Dalmatia, saving
them from communism. With the help of the Gestapo, Ante Pavelić reacted
promptly and arrested the conspirators on 30 August 1944, which failed to