The Yugoslav Partisans were an 800,000-strong resistance movement in the Balkans led by Josip Broz Tito's Communist Party of Yugoslavia. They were the most effective anti-Axis Powers resistance group during World War II, and their army advanced north into Austria at the end of the war. Following the end of the war, they were reorganized into the Yugoslav People's Army with Tito as the dictator of Yugoslavia, and the former partisan leaders entered the government.
History[]
The Yugoslav National Army of Liberation was formed in 1941 following Nazi Germany's invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II, with most of the partisans initially being surviving military units. Eventually, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito took over command of the partisans, and the partisans became an effective resistance movement against the Nazis and the Royal Italian Army. In September 1943, they took over the Italian Army's weaponry and uniforms after the armistice was signed with the Allied Powers, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom stopped supporting Draza Mihailovic's monarchist Chetniks in favor of Tito's partisans. The Yugoslavs helped in liberating large areas of Yugoslavia in addition to neighboring Albania and moving north as the Wehrmacht evacuated the Balkans in 1944 during Operation Bagration, and the National Army of Liberation ended the war in southern Austria and Czechoslovakia after accompanying the Soviet Union's Red Army in their advance into Germany.
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