War We Lost (ePub)

In the history of this century the Balkans, boundary between the East and the West, assume an importance far out of proportion to their geographical extent and the size of their population. The key spot in this troubled, conflict-ridden area is Yugoslavia. Here (in what was then Serbia) World War I began. Here the Hitler-Stalin alliance disintegrated. Here, during World War II, an angry popular revolution against a government committed to appeasement of Hitler, and the resistance which followed, delayed the German attack on Russia by six weeks, and according to official and authoritative German estimates, cost the Nazis the war. Here the Western Allies, guided by opportunistic political considerations rather than the principles which they had laid down in the Atlantic Charter, made one of the greatest mistakes of the war by shifting their support from Mihailovich to Tito. Here lie some of the gravest causes of post-war disagreement between the United States and Russia. Here international communism originally set up headquarters for the Cominform. Here, at the end of June 1948, occurred the first serious split between Soviet Russia and one of her satellite states. And here are some of the seeds of dissension from which World War III may be born.It is the purpose of this book to explain how these things happened by presenting the history of Yugoslavia during World War II and telling the story of the ordeal of the Serbian people and the price they paid for remaining faithful to their traditions of freedom and their loyalty to the Western democracies.