The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War by Hoare Marko Attila;

Author:Hoare, Marko Attila;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

The 18th Croat Brigade

The successes of the NOP brought expansion. But this was a double-edged sword: the more the NOP expanded from the loyal core of Partisans and their supporters that existed in November 1942, the more it took in elements whose loyalty to the struggle and, subsequently, to the new order, was questionable. Early on in the NOP, in the spring of 1942, the Communists had come to grief when a large portion of the Serb rebel units under their command—nominally ‘Partisan’ but often more Chetnik in their sympathies—had gone over to the Chetniks, killing many of their Partisan commanders and comrades in the process. As the NOP expanded from 1943 onward to include large numbers of Muslims and Croats as well as Serbs the pattern was repeated among new units, of expansion, desertion and contraction to a stable core of reliable Partisans. This was a necessary part of the process of the creation of a genuinely multinational, all-Bosnian Partisan army out of the human raw material thrown up by war and revolution.

Just as the NOP had subverted the predominantly Croat and Muslim NDH forces from within, so the Ustashas sought, with some success, to subvert Muslim or Croat Partisan units; this was highlighted by the fate of the 18th Croat Brigade, the flagship Bosnian Croat Partisan unit. The unit was formed on 10 October following the liberation of Tuzla at a ceremony held at Husino in commemoration of the miners’ uprising of 1920. It was a wholly new unit formed from the untried new recruits from Tuzla and the Croat villages of the mining districts of Kreka and Husino. In the words of its staff: ‘As the first Croat brigade on the territory of all Bosnia-Hercegovina, it had the important political task of drawing the Croat masses, who were the most vacillating, as much as possible behind the People’s Liberation Struggle.’ Yet the unit, initially 90 per cent Croat, was largely composed of former Home Guards, and lacked Communist cadres sufficient to ensure its discipline. Its ability to mobilise Croats waned the further it travelled from proletarian Tuzla and its non-Communist command cadres were unreliable.133 The Staff of the 3rd Corps noted that the 18th Brigade ‘did not offer sufficient resistance to the Germans’ during their counter-offensive around Tuzla, and that ‘the reason for this was its unconfident military leadership, which is largely made up of Home Guard officers who went over to our army during the liberation of Tuzla’.134

Soon after the 18th Brigade’s formation its staff executed two of its soldiers in an effort to halt desertions among raw recruits, but success was only temporary. The Staff reported on 13 November that fifty to sixty soldiers led by two company commanders—former Home Guards—had deserted under the influence of a Catholic priest working for the Germans who had contacted them via their parents in German-held Tuzla and offered amnesty in return for their desertion. The Staff noted: ‘There exists a further possibility that in our ranks there are

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