https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35935Ben Shepherd. Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 384 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-04891-1.
[I have reservations about this book as War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans by Ben Shepherd is one of the worst written and worst edited (if at all) books I've read this century]
Reviewed by Tal Tovy (Bar Ilan University)
Published on H-War (August, 2012)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
On April 6, 1941, Germany armies invaded Yugoslavia after it had refused to join the Axis countries. Within eleven days, the Yugoslavian army surrendered and the country came under the control of the Nazi Empire. Almost immediately, Yugoslavian partisans organized themselves and began armed resistance against Nazi occupation. Throughout a conquered Europe, and also from 1941 in the territories taken over from the Soviet Union, Germany waged war against irregular forces, but Yugoslavia was an exceptional case because of the intensity of its resistance. Although the partisans in the Soviet Union constituted an operational problem for the German forces, partisan warfare was integrated within the total obdurate struggle between two giant armies. In Yugoslavia, in contrast, this was an irregular war that engaged German forces in an area clearly controlled by Germany. For the Soviet Union, the partisans were an auxiliary arm of the regular forces that was used to execute missions beyond enemy lines according to directions from Moscow, although this was not so at the beginning of the war. In Yugoslavia the partisans were the army. Ctd....
Attrition, the strategy that dares not speak its name.
by Qvist on 06 Aug 2012 13:26 
