title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Two of the principal constituent national groups, Slovenes and Croats, were not prepared to fight in defense of a Yugoslav state with a continued Serb monarchy. The only effective opposition to the invasion was from units wholly from Serbia itself. The Serbian General Staff was united on the question of Yugoslavia as a "Greater Serbia" ruled, in one way or another, by Serbia. On the eve of the invasion, there were 165 generals on the Yugoslav active list. Of these, all but four were Serbs.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The terms of the surrender were extremely severe, as the Axis proceeded to dismember Yugoslavia. Germany annexed northern Slovenia, while retaining direct occupation over a rump Serbian state. Germany also exercised considerable influence over the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) proclaimed on 10 April, which extended over much of today's Croatia and contained all of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the fact that the Treaties of Rome concluded between the NDH and Italy on 18 May envisioned the NDH becoming an effective protectorate of Italy. Mussolini's Italy gained the remainder of Slovenia, Kosovo, coastal and inland areas of the Croatian Littoral and large chunks of the coastal Dalmatia region (along with nearly all of the Adriatic islands and the Bay of Kotor). It also gained control over the Italian governorate of Montenegro, and was granted the kingship in the Independent State of Croatia, though wielding little real power within it; although it did (alongside Germany) maintain a de facto zone of influence within the borders of the NDH. Hungary dispatched the Hungarian Third Army to occupy Vojvodina in northern Serbia, and later forcibly annexed sections of Baranja, Bačka, Međimurje, and Prekmurje.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Bulgarian army moved in on 19 April 1941, occupying nearly all of modern-day North Macedonia and some districts of eastern Serbia which, with Greek western Thrace and eastern Macedonia (the Aegean Province), were annexed by Bulgaria on 14 May.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The government in exile was now only recognized by the Allied powers. The Axis had recognized the territorial acquisitions of their allied states.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: From the start, the Yugoslav resistance forces consisted of two factions: the Partisans, a communist-led movement propagating pan-Yugoslav tolerance ("brotherhood and unity") and incorporating republican, left-wing and liberal elements of Yugoslav politics, on one hand, and the Chetniks, a conservative royalist and nationalist force, enjoying support almost exclusively from the Serbian population in occupied Yugoslavia, on the other hand. From the start and until 1943, the Chetniks, who fought in the name of the London-based King Peter II′s Yugoslav government-in-exile, enjoyed recognition and support from the Western Allies, while the Partisans were supported by the Soviet Union.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: At the very beginning, the Partisan forces were relatively small, poorly armed, and without any infrastructure. But they had two major advantages over other military and paramilitary formations in former Yugoslavia: the first and most immediate advantage was a small but valuable cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans. Unlike some of the other military and paramilitary formations, these veterans had experience with a modern war fought in circumstances quite similar to those found in World War II Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, the Partisans likewise drew on the experienced TIGR members to train troops.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Their other major advantage, which became more apparent in the later stages of the War, was in the Partisans being founded on a communist ideology rather than ethnicity. Therefore, they won support that crossed national lines, meaning they could expect at least some levels of support in almost any corner of the country, unlike other paramilitary formations limited to territories with Croat or Serb majority. This allowed their units to be more mobile and fill their ranks with a larger pool of potential recruits.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: While the activity of the Macedonian and Slovene Partisans were part of the Yugoslav People's Liberation War, the specific conditions in Macedonia and Slovenia, due to the strong autonomist tendencies of the local communists, led to the creation of separate sub-armies called the People's Liberation Army of Macedonia, and Slovene Partisans led by Liberation Front of the Slovene People, respectively.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The most numerous local force, apart from the four second-line German Wehrmacht infantry divisions assigned to occupation duties, was the Croatian Home Guard ("Hrvatsko domobranstvo") founded in April 1941, a few days after the founding of the NDH. The force was formed with the authorisation of German authorities. The task of the new Croatian armed forces was to defend the new state against both foreign and domestic enemies. The Croatian Home Guard was originally limited to 16 infantry battalions and 2 cavalry squadrons – 16,000 men in total. The original 16 battalions were soon enlarged to 15 infantry regiments of two battalions each between May and June 1941, organised into five divisional commands, some 55,000 enlisted men. Support units included 35 light tanks supplied by Italy, 10 artillery battalions (equipped with captured Royal Yugoslav Army weapons of Czech origin), a cavalry regiment in Zagreb and an independent cavalry battalion at Sarajevo. Two independent motorized infantry battalions were based at Zagreb and Sarajevo respectively. Several regiments of Ustaše militia were also formed at this time, which operated under a separate command structure to, and independently from, the Croatian Home Guard, until late 1944. The Home Guard crushed the Serb revolt in Eastern Herzegovina in June 1941, and in July they fought in Eastern and Western Bosnia. They fought in Eastern Herzegovina again, when Croatian-Dalmatian and Slavonian battalions reinforced local units.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Italian High Command assigned 24 divisions and three coastal brigades to occupation duties in Yugoslavia from 1941. These units were located from Slovenia, Croatia and Dalmatia through to Montenegro and Kosovo.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: From 1931 to 1939, the Soviet Union had prepared communists for a guerrilla war in Yugoslavia. On the eve of the war, hundreds of future prominent Yugoslav communist leaders completed special "partisan courses" organised by the Soviet military intelligence in the Soviet Union and Spain.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) received orders from Moscow-based Comintern to come to the Soviet Union's aid. On the same day, Croatian communists set up the 1st Sisak Partisan Detachment, the first armed anti-fascist resistance unit formed by a resistance movement in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. The detachment began resistance activities the day after its creation; launching sabotage and diversionary attacks on nearby railway lines, destroying telegraph poles, attacking municipal buildings in surrounding villages, seizing arms and ammunition and creating a Communist propaganda network in Sisak and nearby villages. At the same time, the CPY's Provincial Committee for Serbia made its decision to launch an armed uprising in Serbia and put together its Supreme Staff of the National Liberation Partisan Units of Yugoslavia to be chaired by Josip Broz Tito. On 4 July, a formal order to begin the uprising was issued. On 7 July, the Bela Crkva incident happened, which would later be considered the beginning of the uprising in Serbia. On 10 August 1941 in Stanulović, a mountain village, the Partisans formed the Kopaonik Partisan Detachment Headquarters. Their liberated area, consisting of nearby villages and called the "Miners Republic", was the first in Yugoslavia, and lasted 42 days. The resistance fighters formally joined the ranks of the Partisans later on.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Chetnik movement (officially the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland, JVUO) was organised following the surrender of the Royal Yugoslav Army by some of the remaining Yugoslav soldiers. This force was organised in the Ravna Gora district of western Serbia under Colonel Draža Mihailović in mid-May 1941. However, unlike the Partisans, Mihailović's forces were almost entirely ethnic Serbs. The Partisans and Chetniks attempted to cooperate early during the conflict and Chetniks were active in the uprising in Serbia, but this fell apart thereafter.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: As the levels of resistance to its occupation grew, the Axis Powers responded with numerous minor offensives. There were also seven major Axis operations specifically aimed at eliminating all or most Yugoslav Partisan resistance. These major offensives were typically combined efforts by the German Wehrmacht and SS, Italy, Chetniks, the Independent State of Croatia, the Serbian collaborationist government, Bulgaria, and Hungary.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The First Anti-Partisan Offensive was the attack conducted by the Axis in autumn of 1941 against the "Republic of Užice", a liberated territory the Partisans established in western Serbia. In November 1941, German troops attacked and reoccupied this territory, with the majority of Partisan forces escaping towards Bosnia. It was during this offensive that tenuous collaboration between the Partisans and the royalist Chetnik movement broke down and turned into open hostility.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: After fruitless negotiations, the Chetnik leader, General Mihailović, turned against the Partisans as his main enemy. According to him, the reason was humanitarian: the prevention of German reprisals against Serbs. This however, did not stop the activities of the Partisan resistance, and Chetnik units attacked the Partisans in November 1941, while increasingly receiving supplies and cooperating with the Germans and Italians in this. The British liaison to Mihailović advised London to stop supplying the Chetniks after the Užice attack (see First Anti-Partisan Offensive), but Britain continued to do so.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 22 December 1941 the Partisans formed the 1st Proletarian Assault Brigade ("1. Proleterska Udarna Brigada") – the first regular Partisan military unit capable of operating outside its local area. 22 December became the "Day of the Yugoslav People's Army".


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 15 January 1942, the Bulgarian 1st Army, with 3 infantry divisions, transferred to south-eastern Serbia. Headquartered at Niš, it replaced German divisions needed in Croatia and the Soviet Union.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Chetniks initially enjoyed the support of the Western Allies (up to the Tehran Conference in December 1943). In 1942, "Time Magazine" featured an article which praised the "success" of Mihailović's Chetniks and heralded him as the sole defender of freedom in Nazi-occupied Europe.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Tito's Partisans fought the Germans more actively during this time. Tito and Mihailović had a bounty of 100,000 Reichsmarks offered by Germans for their heads. While "officially" remaining mortal enemies of the Germans and the Ustaše, the Chetniks were known for making clandestine deals with the Italians. The Second Enemy Offensive was a coordinated Axis attack conducted in January 1942 against Partisan forces in eastern Bosnia. The Partisan troops once again avoided encirclement and were forced to retreat over the Igman mountain near Sarajevo.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Third Enemy Offensive, an offensive against Partisan forces in eastern Bosnia, Montenegro, Sandžak and Herzegovina which took place in the spring of 1942. It was known as "Operation TRIO" by the Germans, and again ended with a timely Partisan escape. Over the course of the summer, they conducted the so-called Partisan Long March westwards through Bosnia and Herzegovina, while at the same time the Axis conducted the Kozara Offensive in northwestern Bosnia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Partisans fought an increasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the Axis occupiers and their local collaborators, including the Chetniks (which they also considered collaborators). They enjoyed gradually increased levels of success and support of the general populace, and succeeded in controlling large chunks of Yugoslav territory. People's committees were organised to act as civilian governments in areas of the country liberated by the Partisans. In places, even limited arms industries were set up.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: To gather intelligence, agents of the Western Allies were infiltrated into both the Partisans and the Chetniks. The intelligence gathered by liaisons to the resistance groups was crucial to the success of supply missions and was the primary influence on Allied strategy in the Yugoslavia. The search for intelligence ultimately resulted in the decline of the Chetniks and their eclipse by Tito's Partisans. In 1942, though supplies were limited, token support was sent equally to each. In November 1942, Partisan detachments were officially merged into the People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia ("NOV i POJ").


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In the first half of 1943 two Axis offensives came close to defeating the Partisans. They are known by their German code names Fall Weiss "(Case White)" and Fall Schwarz "(Case Black)", as the Battle of Neretva and the Battle of Sutjeska after the rivers in the areas they were fought, or the Fourth and Fifth Enemy Offensive, respectively, according to former Yugoslav historiography.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 7 January 1943, the Bulgarian 1st Army also occupied south-west Serbia. Savage pacification measures reduced Partisan activity appreciably. Bulgarian infantry divisions participated in the Fifth anti-Partisan Offensive as a blocking force of the Partisan escape-route from Montenegro into Serbia and in the Sixth anti-Partisan Offensive in Eastern Bosnia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Negotiations between Germans and Partisans started on 11 March 1943 in Gornji Vakuf, Bosnia. Tito's key officers Vladimir Velebit, Koča Popović and Milovan Đilas brought three proposals, first about an exchange of prisoners, second about the implementation of international law on treatment of prisoners and third about political questions. The delegation expressed concerns about the Italian involvement in supplying the Chetnik army and stated that the National Liberation Movement is an independent movement, with no aid from the Soviet Union or the UK. Somewhat later, Đilas and Velebit were brought to Zagreb to continue the negotiations.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In the Fourth Enemy Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Neretva or "Fall Weiss" (Case White), Axis forces pushed Partisan troops to retreat from western Bosnia to northern Herzegovina, culminating in the Partisan retreat over the Neretva river. It took place from January to April, 1943.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Fifth Enemy Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Sutjeska or "Fall Schwarz" (Case Black), immediately followed the Fourth Offensive and included a complete encirclement of Partisan forces in southeastern Bosnia and northern Montenegro in May and June 1943.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Croatian Home Guard reached its maximum size at the end of 1943, when it had 130,000 men. It also included an air force, the Air Force of the Independent State of Croatia ("Zrakoplovstvo Nezavisne Države Hrvatske", or ZNDH), the backbone of which was provided by 500 former Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers and 1,600 NCOs with 125 aircraft. By 1943 the ZNDH was 9,775 strong and equipped with 295 aircraft.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 8 September 1943, the Italians concluded an armistice with the Allies, leaving 17 divisions stranded in Yugoslavia. All divisional commanders refused to join the Germans. Two Italian infantry divisions joined the Montenegrin Partisans as complete units, while another joined the Albanian Partisans. Other units surrendered to the Germans to face imprisonment in Germany or summary execution. Others surrendered themselves, arms, ammunition and equipment to Croatian forces or to the Partisans, simply disintegrated, or reached Italy on foot via Trieste or by ship across the Adriatic. The Italian Governorship of Dalmatia was disestablished and the country's possessions were subsequently divided between Germany, which established its Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, and the Independent State of Croatia, which established the new district of Sidraga-Ravni Kotari. The former Italian kingdoms of Albania and of Montenegro were placed under German occupation.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 25 September 1943, the German High Command launched Operation ""Istrien"", and on October 21 the military operation ""Wolkenbruch"" with the aim of destroying Partisan units in the Slovene-populated lands, Istria and the Littoral. In that operation 2,500 Istrians were killed among whom were Partisans and civilians (including women, children, and elderly). Partisan units which did not withdraw from Istria in time were completely destroyed. German troops, including the SS division "Prinz Eugen", on September 25 began to carry out a plan for the complete destruction of the Partisans in Primorska and Istria.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The events which occurred in 1943 would bring about a change in the attitude of the Allies. The Germans were executing Operation Schwarz (Battle of Sutjeska, the Fifth anti-Partisan offensive), one of a series of offensives aimed at the resistance fighters, when F.W.D. Deakin was sent by the British to gather information. His reports contained two important observations. The first was that the Partisans were courageous and aggressive in battling the German 1st Mountain and 104th Light Division, had suffered significant casualties, and required support. The second observation was that the entire German 1st Mountain Division had transited from the Soviet Union on rail lines through Chetnik-controlled territory. British intercepts (ULTRA) of German message traffic confirmed Chetnik timidity. Even though today many circumstances, facts, and motivations remain unclear, intelligence reports resulted in increased Allied interest in Yugoslavia air operations and shifted policy.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Sixth Enemy Offensive was a series of operations undertaken by the Wehrmacht and the Ustaše after the capitulation of Italy in an attempt to secure the Adriatic coast. It took place in the autumn and winter of 1943/1944.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: At this point the Partisans were able to win the moral, as well as limited material support of the Western Allies, who until then had supported General Draža Mihailović's Chetnik Forces, but were finally convinced of their collaboration by many intelligence-gathering missions dispatched to both sides during the course of the war.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In September 1943, at Churchill's request, Brigadier General Fitzroy Maclean was parachuted to Tito's headquarters near Drvar to serve as a permanent, formal liaison to the Partisans. While the Chetniks were still occasionally supplied, the Partisans received the bulk of all future support.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: When the AVNOJ (the Partisan wartime council in Yugoslavia) was eventually recognized by the Allies, by late 1943, the official recognition of the Partisan Democratic Federal Yugoslavia soon followed. The National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia was recognized by the major Allied powers at the Tehran Conference, when United States agreed to the position of other Allied. The newly recognized Yugoslav government, headed by Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito, was a joint body formed of AVNOJ members and the members of the former government-in-exile in London. The resolution of a fundamental question, whether the new state remained a monarchy or was to be a republic, was postponed until the end of the war, as was the status of King Peter II.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Subsequent to switching their support to the Partisans, the Allies set-up the RAF Balkan Air Force (under the suggestion of Brigadier-General Fitzroy Maclean) with the aim to provide increased supplies and tactical air support for Marshal Tito's Partisan forces.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In January 1944, Tito's forces unsuccessfully attacked Banja Luka. But, while Tito was forced to withdraw, Mihajlović and his forces were also noted by the Western press for their lack of activity.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Seventh Enemy Offensive was the final Axis attack in western Bosnia in the spring of 1944, which included "Operation Rösselsprung" (Knight's Leap), an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate Josip Broz Tito personally and annihilate the leadership of the Partisan movement.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Allied aircraft specifically started targeting ZNDH (Air Force of the Independent State of Croatia) and Luftwaffe bases and aircraft for the first time as a result of the Seventh Offensive, including "Operation Rösselsprung" in late May 1944. Up until then Axis aircraft could fly inland almost at will, as long as they remained at low altitude. Partisan units on the ground frequently complained about enemy aircraft attacking them while hundreds of Allied aircraft flew above at higher altitude. This changed during "Rösselsprung" as Allied fighter-bombers went low en-masse for the first time, establishing full aerial superiority. Consequently, both the ZNDH and Luftwaffe were forced to limit their operations in clear weather to early morning and late afternoon hours.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Yugoslav Partisan movement grew to become the largest resistance force in occupied Europe, with 800,000 men organised in 4 field armies. Eventually the Partisans prevailed against all of their opponents as the official army of the newly founded Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In 1944, the Macedonian and Serbian commands made contact in southern Serbia and formed a joint command, which consequently placed the Macedonian Partisans under the direct command of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. The Slovene Partisans also merged with Tito's forces in 1944.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 16 June 1944, the Tito-Šubašić agreement between the Partisans and the Yugoslav Government in exile of King Peter II was signed on the island of Vis. This agreement was an attempt to form a new Yugoslav government which would include both the communists and the royalists. It called for a merge of the Partisan Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia ("Antifašističko V(ij)eće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije", AVNOJ) and the Government in exile. The Tito-Šubašić agreement also called on all Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs to join the Partisans. The Partisans were recognized by the Royal Government as Yugoslavia's regular army. Mihajlović and many Chetniks refused to answer the call. The Chetniks were, however, praised for saving 500 downed Allied pilots in 1944; United States President Harry S. Truman posthumously awarded Mihailović the Legion of Merit for his contribution to the Allied victory.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In August 1944 after the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive overwhelmed the front line of Germany's Army Group South Ukraine, King Michael I of Romania staged a coup, Romania quit the war, and the Romanian army was placed under the command of the Red Army. Romanian forces, fighting against Germany, participated in the Prague Offensive. Bulgaria quit as well and, on 10 September, declared war on Germany and its remaining allies. The weak divisions sent by the Axis powers to invade Bulgaria were easily driven back.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In Macedonia, the Germans swiftly disarmed the 1st Occupation Corps of 5 divisions and the 5th Army, despite short-lived resistance by the latter. Survivors fought their way back to the old borders of Bulgaria.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: After the occupation of Bulgaria by the Soviet army, negotiations between Tito and the Bulgarian communist leaders were organised which ultimately resulted in a military alliance between the two.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In late September 1944, three Bulgarian armies, some 455,000 strong in total led by General Georgi Marinov Mandjev, entered Yugoslavia with the strategic task of blocking the German forces withdrawing from Greece.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The new Bulgarian People's Army and the Red Army 3rd Ukrainian Front troops were concentrated at the old Bulgarian-Yugoslav border. At the dawn of October 8th, they entered Yugoslavia from the south. The First and Fourth Bulgarian Armies invaded Vardar Macedonia, and the Second Army south-eastern Serbia. The First Army then swung north with the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front, through eastern Yugoslavia and south-western Hungary, before linking up with the British 8th Army in Austria in May 1945.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Concurrently, with Allied air support and assistance from the Red Army, the Partisans turned their attention to Central Serbia. The chief objective was to disrupt railroad communications in the valleys of the Vardar and Morava rivers, and prevent Germans from withdrawing their 300,000+ forces from Greece.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Allied air forces sent 1,973 aircraft (mostly from the US 15th Air Force) over Yugoslavia, which discharged over 3,000 tons of bombs. On 17 August 1944 Marshal Josip Broz Tito offered an amnesty to all collaborators. On 12 September, King Peter broadcast a message from London, calling upon all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to "join the National Liberation Army under the leadership of Marshal Tito". The message reportedly had a devastating effect on the morale of the Chetniks, many of which later defected to the Partisans. They were followed by a substantial number of former Croatian Home Guard and Slovene Home Guard troops.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In September under the leadership of the new Bulgarian pro-Soviet government, four Bulgarian armies, 455,000 strong in total, were mobilized. By the end of September, the Red Army (3rd Ukrainian Front) troops were concentrated at the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border. In the early October 1944 three Bulgarian armies, consisting of around 340,000 men, together with the Red Army, reentered occupied Yugoslavia and moved from Sofia to Niš, Skopje and Pristina to block the German forces withdrawing from Greece. The Red Army organised the Belgrade Offensive, and took the city on 20 October. At the onset of winter, the Partisans effectively controlled the entire eastern half of Yugoslavia—Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro—as well as most of the Dalmatian coast. The Wehrmacht and the forces of the Ustaše-controlled Independent State of Croatia fortified a front in Syrmia that held through the winter of 1944–45 in order to aid the evacuation of German Army Group E from the Balkans. To raise the number of Partisan troops Tito again offered the amnesty on 21 November 1944. In November 1944, the units of the Ustaše militia and the Croatian Home Guard were reorganised and combined to form the Army of the Independent State of Croatia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Germans continued their retreat. Having lost the easier withdrawal route through Serbia, they fought to hold the Syrmian front in order to secure the more difficult passage through Kosovo, Sandzak and Bosnia. They even scored a series of temporary successes against the People's Liberation Army. They left Mostar on 12 February 1945. They did not leave Sarajevo until 15 April. Sarajevo had assumed a last-moment strategic position as the only remaining withdrawal route and was held at substantial cost. In early March the Germans moved troops from southern Bosnia to support an unsuccessful counter-offensive in Hungary, which enabled the NOV to score some successes by attacking the Germans' weakened positions. Although strengthened by Allied aid, a secure rear and mass conscription in areas under their control, the one-time partisans found it difficult to switch to conventional warfare, particularly in the open country west of Belgrade, where the Germans held their own until mid-April in spite of all of the raw and untrained conscripts the NOV hurled in a bloody war of attrition against the Syrmian Front.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 8 March 1945, a coalition Yugoslav government was formed in Belgrade with Tito as Premier and Ivan Šubašić as Foreign Minister.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 20 March 1945, the Partisans launched a general offensive in the Mostar-Višegrad-Drina sector. With large swaths of Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian countryside already under Partisan guerrilla control, the final operations consisted in connecting these territories and capturing major cities and roads. For the general offensive Marshal Josip Broz Tito commanded a Partisan force of about 800,000 men organised into four armies: the


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In addition, the Yugoslav Partisans had eight independent army corps (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, and the 10th).


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Set against the Yugoslav Partisans was German General Alexander Löhr of Army Group E ("Heeresgruppe E"). This Army Group had seven army corps :


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: These corps included seventeen weakened divisions (1st Cossack, 2nd Cossack, 7th SS, 11th Luftwaffe Field Division, 22nd, 41st, 104th, 117th, 138th, 181st, 188th, 237th, 297th, 369th Croat, 373rd Croat, 392nd Croat and the 14th SS Ukrainian Division). In addition to the seven corps, the Axis had remnant naval and Luftwaffe forces, under constant attack by the British Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and United States Air Force.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The army of the Independent State of Croatia was at the time composed of eighteen divisions: 13 infantry, two mountain, two assault and one replacement Croatian Divisions, each with its own organic artillery and other support units. There were also several armoured units. From early 1945, the Croatian Divisions were allocated to various German corps and by March 1945 were holding the Southern Front. Securing the rear areas were some 32,000 men of the Croatian gendarmerie ("Hrvatsko Oružništvo"), organised into 5 Police Volunteer Regiments plus 15 independent battalions, equipped with standard light infantry weapons, including mortars.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Air Force of the Independent State of Croatia ("Zrakoplovstvo Nezavisne Države Hrvatske", or ZNDH) and the units of the Croatian Air Force Legion ("Hrvatska Zrakoplovna Legija", or HZL), returned from service on the Eastern Front provided some level of air support (attack, fighter and transport) right up until May 1945, encountering and sometimes defeating opposing aircraft from the British Royal Air Force, United States Air Force and the Soviet Air Force. Although 1944 had been a catastrophic year for the ZNDH, with aircraft losses amounting to 234, primarily on the ground, it entered 1945 with 196 machines. Further deliveries of new aircraft from Germany continued in the early months of 1945 to replace losses. By 10 March, the ZNDH had 23 Messerschmitt 109 G&Ks, three Morane-Saulnier M.S.406, six Fiat G.50 Freccia, and two Messerschmitt 110 G fighters. The final deliveries of up-to-date German Messerschmitt 109 G and K fighter aircraft were still taking place in March 1945. and the ZNDH still had 176 aircraft on its strength in April 1945.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Between 30 March and 8 April 1945, General Mihailović's Chetniks mounted a final attempt to establish themselves as a credible force fighting the Axis in Yugoslavia. The Chetniks under Lieutenant Colonel Pavle Đurišić fought a combination of Ustaša and Croatian Home Guard forces in the Battle on Lijevča field. In late March 1945 elite NDH Army units were withdrawn from the Syrmian front to destroy Djurisic's Chetniks trying to make their way across the northern NDH. The battle was fought near Banja Luka in what was then the Independent State of Croatia and ended in a decisive victory for the Independent State of Croatia forces.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Serbian units included the remnants of the Serbian State Guard and the Serbian Volunteer Corps from the Serbian Military Administration. There were even some units of the Slovene Home Guard ("Slovensko domobranstvo", SD) still intact in Slovenia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: By the end of March, 1945, it was obvious to the Croatian Army Command that, although the front remained intact, they would eventually be defeated by sheer lack of ammunition. For this reason, the decision was made to retreat into Austria, in order to surrender to the British forces advancing north from Italy. The German Army was in the process of disintegration and the supply system lay in ruins.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Bihać was liberated by the Partisans the same day that the general offensive was launched. The 4th Army, under the command of Petar Drapšin, broke through the defences of the XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps. By 20 April, Drapšin liberated Lika and the Croatian Littoral, including the islands, and reached the old Yugoslav border with Italy. On 1 May, after capturing the Italian territories of Rijeka and Istria from the German LXXXXVII Corps, the Yugoslav 4th Army beat the western Allies to Trieste by one day.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Yugoslav 2nd Army, under the command of Koča Popović, forced a crossing of the Bosna River on 5 April, capturing Doboj, and reached the Una River. On 6 April, the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Corps of the Yugoslav Partisans took Sarajevo from the German XXI Corps. On 12 April, the Yugoslav 3rd Army, under the command of Kosta Nađ, forced a crossing of the Drava river. The 3rd Army then fanned out through Podravina, reached a point north of Zagreb, and crossed the old Austrian border with Yugoslavia in the Dravograd sector. The 3rd Army closed the ring around the enemy forces when its advanced motorized detachments linked up with detachments of the 4th Army in Carinthia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Also, on 12 April, the Yugoslav 1st Army, under the command of Peko Dapčević penetrated the fortified front of the German XXXIV Corps in Syrmia. By 22 April, the 1st Army had smashed the fortifications and was advancing towards Zagreb.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The long-drawn out liberation of western Yugoslavia caused more victims among the population. The breakthrough of the Syrmian front on 12 April was, in Milovan Đilas's words, "the greatest and bloodiest battle our army had ever fought", and it would not have been possible had it not been for Soviet instructors and arms.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: By the time General Peko Dapčević's NOV units had reached Zagreb, on 9 May 1945, they had perhaps lost as many as 36,000 dead. There were by then over 400,000 refugees in Zagreb. After entering Zagreb with the Yugoslav 2nd Army, both armies advanced in Slovenia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 2 May, the German capital city, Berlin, fell to the Red Army. On 8 May 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally and the war in Europe officially ended. The Italians had quit the war in 1943, the Bulgarians in 1944, and the Hungarians earlier in 1945. Despite the German capitulation, however, sporadic fighting still took place in Yugoslavia. On 7 May, Zagreb was evacuated, on 9 May, Maribor and Ljubljana were captured by the Partisans, and General Alexander Löhr, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group E was forced to sign the total surrender of the forces under his command at Topolšica, near Velenje, Slovenia, on Wednesday 9 May 1945. Only the Croatian and other anti-Partisan forces remained.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: From 10 to 15 May, the Yugoslav Partisans continued to face resistance from Croatian, and other anti-Partisan forces throughout the rest of Croatia and Slovenia. The Battle of Poljana started on 14 May, ending on 15 May 1945 at Poljana, near Prevalje in Slovenia. It was the culmination and last of a series of battles between Yugoslav Partisans and a large (in excess of 30,000) mixed column of German Army ("Heer") soldiers together with Croatian Ustaše, Croatian Home Guard, Slovenian Home Guard, and other anti-Partisan forces who were attempting to retreat to Austria. Battle of Odžak was the last World War II battle in Europe. The battle began on 19 April 1945 and lasted until 25 May 1945, 17 days after the end of the war in Europe.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 5 May, in the town of Palmanova (50 km northwest of Trieste), between 2,400 and 2,800 members of the Serbian Volunteer Corps surrendered to the British. On 12 May, about 2,500 additional Serbian Volunteer Corps members surrendered to the British at Unterbergen on the Drava River. On 11 and 12 May, British troops in Klagenfurt, Austria, were harassed by arriving forces of the Yugoslav Partisans. In Belgrade, the British ambassador to the Yugoslav coalition government handed Tito a note demanding that the Yugoslav troops withdraw from Austria.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 15 May 1945 a large column of the Croatian Home Guard, the Ustaše, the XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps and the remnants of the Serbian State Guard, and the Serbian Volunteer Corps, arrived at the southern Austrian border near the town of Bleiburg. The representatives of the Independent State of Croatia attempted to negotiate a surrender to the British under the terms of the Geneva Convention that they had joined in 1943, and were recognised by it as a "belligerent", but were ignored. Most of the people in the column were turned over to the Yugoslav government as part of what is sometimes referred to as Operation Keelhaul. Following the repatriations, the Partisans proceeded to brutalize the POWs. The Partisans' actions were partly done for revenge as well as to suppress the potential continuation of armed struggle within Yugoslavia.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 15 May, Tito had placed Partisan forces in Austria under Allied control. A few days later he agreed to withdraw them. By 20 May, Yugoslav troops in Austria had begun to withdraw. On 8 June, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia agreed on the control of Trieste. On 11 November, parliamentary elections were held in Yugoslavia. In these elections the communists had an important advantage because they controlled the police, judiciary and media. For that reason the opposition did not want to participate in the elections. On 29 November, in accordance with election result, Peter II was deposed by communist dominated Yugoslavia's Constituent Assembly. On the same day, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was established as a socialist state during the first meeting of the Yugoslav Parliament in Belgrade. Josip Broz Tito was appointed Prime Minister. The autonomist wing in the Communist Party of Macedonia, which dominated during World War II, was finally pushed aside in 1945 after the Second Assembly of the ASNOM.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 13 March 1946, Mihailović was captured by agents of the Yugoslav Department of National Security ("Odsjek Zaštite Naroda" or OZNA). From 10 June to 15 July of the same year, he was tried for high treason and war crimes. On 15 July, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: On 16 July, a clemency appeal was rejected by the Presidium of the National Assembly. During the early hours of 18 July, Mihailović, together with nine other Chetnik and Nedić's officers, were executed in Lisičji Potok. This execution essentially ended the World War II-era civil war between the communist Partisans and the royalist Chetniks.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Ustashas, a Croatian ultranationalist and fascist movement which operated from 1929 to 1945 and was led by Ante Pavelić, gained control of the newly formed Independent State of Croatia (NDH) that was set up by the Germans after the invasion of Yugoslavia. The Ustashas sought an ethnically pure Croatian state by exterminating Serbs, Jews and Roma from its territory. Their main focus were Serbs, who numbered about two million. The strategy to achieve their goal was purportedly to kill one-third of Serbs, expel one-third and forcibly convert the remaining one-third. The first massacre of Serbs took place on 28 April 1941 in the village of Gudovac where nearly 200 Serbs were rounded up and executed. The event initiated the wave of Ustasha violence targeting Serbs that came in the following weeks and months, as massacres occurred in villages throughout the NDH, particularly in Banija, Kordun, Lika, northwest Bosnia and eastern Herzegovina. Serbs in villages in the countryside were hacked to death with various tools, thrown alive into pits and ravines or in some cases locked in churches that were afterwards set on fire. Ustasha Militia units razed whole villages, often torturing the men and raping the women. Approximately every sixth Serb living in the NDH was the victim of a massacre, meaning that almost every Serb from this region had a family member that was killed in the war, mostly by the Ustashas.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Ustashas also set up camps throughout the NDH. Some of them were used to detain political opponents and those regarded as enemies of the state, some were transit and resettlement camps for the deportation and transfers of populations while others were used for the purpose of mass murder. The largest camp was the Jasenovac concentration camp which was a complex of five subcamps, located some 100 km southeast of Zagreb. The camp was notorious for its barbaric and cruel practices of murder as described by testimonies of witnesses. By the end of 1941, along with Serbs and Roma, NDH authorities incarcerated the majority of the country's Jews in camps including Jadovno, Kruščica, Loborgrad, Đakovo, Tenja and Jasenovac. Nearly the entire Romani population of the NDH was also killed by the Ustashas.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Chetniks, a Serb royalist and nationalist movement which initially resisted the Axis but progressively entered into collaboration with Italian, German and parts of the Ustasha forces, sought the creation of a Greater Serbia by cleansing non-Serbs, mainly Muslims and Croats from territories that would be incorporated into their post-war state. The Chetniks systemically massacred Muslims in villages that they captured. These occurred primarily in eastern Bosnia, in towns and municipalities like Goražde, Foča, Srebrenica and Višegrad. Later, "cleansing actions" against Muslims took place in counties in Sandžak. Actions against Croats were smaller in scale but similar in action. Croats were killed in Bosnia, Herzegovina, northern Dalmatia, and Lika.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In Serbia, in order to squelch resistance, retaliate against their opposition and terrorize the population, the Germans devised a formula where 100 hostages would be shot for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages would be shot for every wounded German soldier. Those primarily targeted for execution were Jews and Serbian communists. The most notable examples were the massacres in the villages of Kraljevo and Kragujevac in October 1941. Germans also set up concentration camps and were aided in their persecution of Jews by Milan Nedić's puppet government and other collaborationist forces.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In April 1941, Italy invaded Yugoslavia, annexing or occupying large portions of Slovenia, Croatia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia, while directly annexing to Italy the Province of Ljubljana, Gorski Kotar and the Governorate of Dalmatia, along with most Croatian islands. To suppress the mounting resistance led by the Slovenian and Croatian Partisans, the Italians adopted tactics of "summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments and the burning of houses and villages." This was particularly the case in the Province of Ljubljana, where Italian authorities terrorized the Slovene civilian population and deported them to concentration camps with the goal of Italianizing the area.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Thousands of Serbs and Jews were massacred by Hungarian forces in the region of Bačka, the territory occupied and annexed by Hungary since 1941. Several high-ranking military officials were complicit in the atrocities.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Partisans engaged in the massacres of civilians during and after the war. A number of Partisan units, and the local population in some areas, engaged in mass murder in the immediate postwar period against POWs and other perceived Axis sympathizers, collaborators, and/or fascists along with their relatives, in the Bleiburg repatriations. These included the Kočevski Rog massacre as well as the foibe massacres and the communist purges in Serbia in 1944–45.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Yugoslav government estimated the number of casualties to be at 1,704,000 and submitted the figure to the International Reparations Commission in 1946 without any documentation. An estimate of 1.7 million war related deaths was later submitted to the Allied Reparations Committee in 1948, despite it being an estimate of total demographic loss that covered the expected population if war did not break out, the number of unborn children, and losses from emigration and disease. After Germany requested verifiable data the Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics created a nationwide survey in 1964. The total number of those killed was found to be 597,323. The list stayed a state secret until 1989 when it was published for the first time.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The U.S. Bureau of the Census published a report in 1954 that concluded that Yugoslav war related deaths were 1,067,000. The U.S. Bureau of the Census noted that the official Yugoslav government figure of 1.7 million war dead was overstated because it "was released soon after the war and was estimated without the benefit of a postwar census". A study by Vladimir Žerjavić estimates total war related deaths at 1,027,000. Military losses are estimated at 237,000 Yugoslav partisans and 209,000 collaborators, while civilian losses at 581,000, including 57,000 Jews. Losses of the Yugoslav Republics were Bosnia 316,000; Serbia 273,000; Croatia 271,000; Slovenia 33,000; Montenegro 27,000; Macedonia 17,000; and killed abroad 80,000. Statistician Bogoljub Kočović calculated that the actual war losses were 1,014,000. The late Jozo Tomasevich, Professor Emeritus of Economics at San Francisco State University, believes that the calculations of Kočović and Žerjavić "seem to be free of bias, we can accept them as reliable". Stjepan Meštrović estimated that about 850,000 people were killed in the war. Vego cites figures from 900,000 to 1,000,000 dead. Stephen R. A'Barrow estimates that the war caused 446,000 dead soldiers and 514,000 dead civilians, or 960,000 dead in total from the Yugoslav population out of 15 million.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Kočović's research into human losses in Yugoslavia during World War Two was considered to be the first objective examination of the issue. Shortly after Kočović published his findings in "Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji", Vladeta Vučković, a U.S. based college professor, claimed in a London-based émigré magazine that he had participated in the calculation of the number of victims in Yugoslavia in 1947. Vučković claimed that the figure of 1,700,000 originated with him, explaining that as an employee of the Yugoslav Federal Statistical Office, he was ordered to estimate the number of casualties suffered by Yugoslavia during the war, using appropriate statistical tools. He came up with an estimated demographic (not real) population loss of 1.7 million. He did not intend for his estimate to be used as a calculation of actual losses. However, Foreign Minister Edvard Kardelj took this figure as the real loss in his negotiations with the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency. This figure had also already been used by Marshal Tito in May 1945, and the figure of 1,685,000 was used by Mitar Bakić, secretary general of the Presidium of the Yugoslav government in an address to foreign correspondents in August 1945. The Yugoslav Reparations Commission had also already communicated the figure of 1,706,000 to the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency in Paris in late 1945. Tito's figure of 1.7 million was aimed at both maximizing war compensation from Germany and demonstrating to the world that the heroism and suffering of Yugoslavs during the Second World War surpassed that of all other peoples save only those of the USSR, and, perhaps, Poland.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In Slovenia, the Institute for Contemporary History, Ljubljana launched a comprehensive research on the exact number of victims of World War II in Slovenia in 1995. After more than a decade of research, the final report was published in 2005, which included a list of names. The number of victims was set at 89,404. The figure also includes the victims of summary killings by the Communist regime immediately after the war (around 13,500 people). The results of the research came as a shock for the public, since the actual figures were more than 30% higher than the highest estimates during the Yugoslav period. Even counting only the number of deaths up to May 1945 (thus excluding the military prisoners killed by the Yugoslav Army between May and July 1945), the number remains considerably higher than the highest previous estimates (around 75,000 deaths versus a previous estimate of 60,000).


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: There are several reasons for such a difference. The new comprehensive research also included Slovenes killed by the Partisan resistance, both in battle (members of collaborationist and anti-Communist units), and civilians (around 4,000 between 1941 and 1945). Furthermore, the new estimates includes all the Slovenians from Nazi-annexed Slovenia who were drafted in the Wehrmacht and died either in battle or in prisoner camps during the war. The figure also includes the Slovenes from the Julian March who died in the Italian Army (1940–43), those from Prekmurje who died in the Hungarian Army, and those who fought and died in various Allied (mostly British) units. The figure does not include victims from Venetian Slovenia (except of those who joined the Slovenian Partisan units), nor does it include the victims among Carinthian Slovenes (again with the exception of those fighting in the Partisan units) and Hungarian Slovenes. 47% percent of casualties during the war were partisans, 33% were civilians (of which 82% were killed by Axis powers or Slovene home guard), and 20% were members of the Slovene home guard.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: According to Žerjavić's research on the losses of the Serbs in the NDH, 82,000 died as members of the Yugoslav Partisans, and 23,000 as Chetniks and Axis collaborators. Of the civilian casualties, 78,000 were killed by the Ustaše in direct terror and in camps, 45,000 by German forces, 15,000 by Italian forces, 34,000 in battles between the Ustaše, the Chetniks, and the Partisans, and 25,000 died of typhoid. A further 20,000 died in the Sajmište concentration camp. According to Ivo Goldstein, on NDH territory 45,000 of Croats are killed as Partisans while 19,000 perishing in prisons or camps.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Žerjavić estimated the structure of the actual war and post-war losses of Croats and Bosniaks. According to his research, 69–71,000 Croats died as members of the NDH armed forces, 43–46,000 as members of the Yugoslav Partisans, and 60–64,000 as civilians, in direct terror and in camps. Outside of the NDH, a further 14,000 Croats died abroad; 4,000 as Partisans and 10,000 civilian victims of terror or in camps. Regarding Bosniaks, including Muslims of Croatia, he estimated that 29,000 died as members of the NDH armed forces, 11,000 as members of the Yugoslav Partisans, while 37,000 were civilians and a further 3,000 Bosniaks were killed abroad; 1,000 Partisans and 2,000 civilians. Of the total Croat and Bosniak civilian casualties in the NDH, his research showed that 41,000 civilian deaths (18,000+ Croats and 20,000+ Bosniaks) were caused by the Chetniks, 24,000 by the Ustaše (17,000 Croats and 7,000 Bosniaks), 16,000 by the Partisans (14,000 Croats and 2,000 Bosniaks), 11,000 by German forces (7,000 Croats and 4,000 Bosniaks), 8,000 by Italian forces (5,000 Croats and 3,000 Bosniaks), while 12,000 died abroad (10,000 Croats and 2,000 Bosniaks).


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: Individual researchers who assert the inevitability of using identification of casualties and fatalities by individual names have raised serious objections to Žerjavić's calculations/estimates of human losses by using standard statistical methods and consolidation of data from various sources, pointing out that such an approach is insufficient and unreliable in determining the number and character of casualties and fatalities, as well as the affiliation of the perpetrators of the crimes.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: In Croatia, the Commission for the Identification of War and Post-War Victims of the Second World War was active from 1991 until the Seventh Government of the republic, under Prime Minister Ivica Račan ended the commission in 2002. In the 2000s, concealed mass grave commissions were established in both Slovenia and Serbia to document and excavate mass graves from the Second World War.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: According to German casualty lists quoted by The Times for 30 July 1945, from documents found amongst the personal effects of General Hermann Reinecke, head of the Public Relations Department of the German High Command, total German casualties in the Balkans amounted to 24,000 killed and 12,000 missing, no figure being mentioned for wounded. A majority of these casualties suffered in the Balkans were inflicted in Yugoslavia. According to German researcher Rüdiger Overmans, German losses in the Balkans were more than three times higher – 103,693 during the course of the war, and some 11,000 who died as Yugoslav prisoners of war.


title: World War II in Yugoslavia

text: The Italians incurred 30,531 casualties during their occupation of Yugoslavia (9,065 killed, 15,160 wounded, 6,306 missing). The ratio of dead/missing men to wounded men was uncommonly high, as Yugoslav partisans would often murder prisoners. Their highest losses were in Bosnia and Herzegovina: 12,394. In Croatia the total was 10,472 and in Montenegro 4,999. Dalmatia was less bellicose: 1,773. The quietest area was Slovenia, where the Italians incurred 893 casualties. An additional 10,090 Italians died post-armistice, either killed during Operation Achse or after joining Yugoslav partisans.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The PCI was founded as "Communist Party of Italy" on 21 January 1921 in Livorno by seceding from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Amadeo Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci, and Nicola Bombacci led the split. Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played a major role in the Italian resistance movement. It changed its name in 1943 to PCI and became the second largest political party of Italy after World War II, attracting the support of about a third of the vote share during the 1970s. At the time, it was the largest communist party in the West, with peak support reaching 2.3 million members, in 1947, and peak share being 34.4% of the vote (12.6 million votes) in the 1976 general election.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The PCI transitioned from doctrinaire Marxism–Leninism to democratic socialism by the 1970s or the 1980s and adhered to the Eurocommunist trend. In 1991, it was dissolved and re-launched as the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), which joined the Socialist International and the Party of European Socialists. The more radical members of the organization formally seceded to establish the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC).


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The roots of the Italian Communist Party date back to 1921, when the Communist Party of Italy ("Partito Comunista d'Italia"; PCdI) held its founding conference in Livorno on 21 January, following a split in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) at their 17th Congress. The split occurred after the socialist Congress of Livorno refused to expel the reformist group as required by the Communist International (Comintern). The main factions of the new party were L'Ordine Nuovo, based in Turin and led by Antonio Gramsci, and the "maximalist" faction led by Nicola Bombacci. Amedeo Bordiga was elected Secretary of the new party.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The party was officially founded with as Communist Party of Italy – Section of the Communist International ("Partito Comunista d'Italia – Sezione dell'Internazionale Comunista"), since the Comintern was structured as a single world party according to Vladimir Lenin's vision.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In 1921, PCdI participated to its first general election, obtaining 4.6% of the vote and 15 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. At the time, it was an active yet small faction within the Italian political left, which was strongly led by the Socialist Party, while on the international plane it was part of Soviet-led.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: During its 2nd Congress in 1922, the new party registered 43,000 members. This was in part due to the entrance of almost the whole Socialist Youth Federation (Federazione Giovanile Socialista). The party adopted a slim structure headed by a Central Committee of 15 members, five of whom were in the Executive Committee as well, namely Ambrogio Belloni, Nicola Bombacci, Amadeo Bordiga (EC), Bruno Fortichiari (EC), Egidio Gennari, Antonio Gramsci, Ruggero Grieco (EC), Anselmo Marabini, Francesco Misiano, Giovanni Parodi, Luigi Polano, Luigi Repossi (EC), Cesare Sessa, Ludovico Tarsia, Umberto Terracini (EC).


title: Italian Communist Party

text: Since its formation, the party strived to organize itself on some bases which were not a mere reproduction of the traditional parties' bases, but then it took again some arguments that distinguished the battle within the PSI, namely the idea that it is necessary to form an environment fiercely hostile to bourgeois society and that is an anticipation of the future socialist society. The purpose of this is not utopian because already in this society, especially in production, some structures are born on future results. In the first years of the PCdI, there was no official leader, but the accepted leader, first of the faction/tendency and then of the party, was Amadeo Bordiga of the Left current. Leaders of the minority currents were Angelo Tasca (Right) and Antonio Gramsci (Center).


title: Italian Communist Party

text: As a territorial section of Comintern, the PCdI adopted the same program, the same conception of the party and the same tactics adopted by the II Congress in Moscow of 1920. The official program, drawn up in ten points, began with the intrinsically catastrophic nature of the capitalist system and terminated with the extinction of the state. It follows in a synthetic way the model outlined by Lenin for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPUS). For a while, this identity resisted, but the fast progress of the reaction in Europe produced a change of tactics in a democratic direction within the PCUS and consequently within the Comintern. This happened in particular regarding the possibility, previously opposed, of an alliance with the social democratic and bourgeois parties. This provoked a tension in the party between the majority (Left) and the minority factions (the Right and the Center) supported by the Comintern. The proposals of the Left were no longer accepted and the conflict between the factions became irremediable.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In 1923, some members of the party were arrested and put on trial for "conspiracy against the State". This allowed the intense activity of the Communist International to deprive the party's left-wing of authority and give control to the minority centre which had aligned with Moscow.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In 1924–1925, the Comintern began a campaign of "Bolshevisation" which forced each party to conform to the discipline and orders of Moscow. During the clandestine conference held in Como to ratify the party leadership in May 1924, 35 of the 45 federation secretaries, plus the secretary of the youth federation, voted for Bordiga's Left, four for Gramsci's Centre and five for Tasca's Right.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: Before the Lyon Congress in 1926, the Centre won almost all the votes in the absence of much of the Left, who were unable to attend as a result of fascist controls and lack of Comintern support. Recourse to the Comintern against this evident manoeuvre had little effect.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The PCdI as conceived by the Left terminated. The organisation continued with the support of the Comintern and a new structure and leadership. In 1922, the newspaper "L'Ordine Nuovo" was closed and in 1924 a new Centre newspaper, l'Unità, edited by Gramsci, was founded. The Left continued as a faction, principally functioning in exile. It published the newspaper Bilan, a monthly theoretical bulletin.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In 1926, Bordiga and Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned on the island of Ustica. In 1927, Palmiro Togliatti was elected secretary in place of Gramsci. In 1930, Bordiga was expelled from the Comintern and accused of Trotskyism.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In 1943, Joseph Stalin dissolved the Communist International and on 15 May the exiled members of the PCdI in Moscow changed the party's name to the PCI. Under this name, it reorganised in Italy and became a parliamentary party after the fall of Fascism.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: On 15 May 1943, the party changed its official name in Italian Communist Party ("Partito Comunista Italiano"), often shortened to PCI.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: This change was not surprising as PCI started being used as the party's acronym around 1924–1925. This name change also reflected a change in the Comintern's role—it increasingly became a federation of national communist parties. This trend accelerated after Lenin's death and its new name emphasized the party's shift from an international focus to an Italian one. At the time, it was a hotly contested issue for the two major factions of the party. On one side, the Leninist preferred the single world party as it was internationalist and strongly centralized while on the other side the Italians wanted a party more tailored to their nation's peculiarities and more autonomy.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: After the fall of Mussolini's regime on 25 July 1943, the Communist Party returned to a formally legal status, playing a major role during the national liberation, known in Italy as "Resistenza" ("Resistance") and forming many partisan groups.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In the April 1944 after the so-called "svolta di Salerno" (Salerno's turn), Togliatti agreed to cooperate with King Victor Emmanuel III and his Prime Minister, the Marshal Pietro Badoglio. After the turn, Communists took part in every government during the national liberation and constitutional period from June 1944 to May 1947. The Communists' contribution to the new Italian democratic constitution was decisive. The so-called "Gullo decrees" of 1944, for instance, sought to improve social and economic conditions in the countryside. During Badoglio and Ferruccio Parri's cabinets, Togliatti served as Deputy Prime Minister.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: During the Resistance, the PCI became increasingly popular, as the majority of partisans were communists. The Garibaldi Brigades, promoted by the PCI, were among the more numerous partisan forces.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The PCI took part in the 1946 Italian general election and referendum, campaigning for the "republic". In the election, the Communists arrived third, behind the Christian Democracy (DC) and the Socialist Party, gaining almost 19% of votes and electing 104 members of the Constituent Assembly. While the popular referendum resulted in the replacement of the monarchy with a republic, with the 54% of votes in favour and 46% against.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In May 1947, the PCI was excluded from the government. The Christian democratic Prime Minister, Alcide De Gasperi, was losing popularity, and feared that the leftist coalition would take power. While the PCI was growing particularly fast due to its organizing efforts supporting sharecroppers in Sicily, Tuscany and Umbria, movements which were also bolstered by the reforms of Fausto Gullo, the Communist Minister of Agriculture. On 1 May, the nation was thrown into crisis by the murder of eleven leftist peasants (including four children) at an International Workers' Day parade in Palermo by Salvatore Giuliano and his gang. In the political chaos which ensued, the president engineered the expulsion of all left-wing ministers from the cabinet on 31 May. The PCI would not have a national position in government again. De Gasperi did this under pressure from US Secretary of State George Marshall, who'd informed him that anti-communism was a pre-condition for receiving American aid, and Ambassador James C. Dunn who had directly asked de Gasperi to dissolve the parliament and remove the PCI.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In the general election of 1948, the party joined the PSI in the Popular Democratic Front (FDP), but it was defeated by the Christian Democracy party. The United States spent over $10 million to support anti-PCI groups in the election. Fearful of the possible FDP's electoral victory, the British and American governments also undermined their campaign for legal justice by tolerating the efforts made by Italy's top authorities to prevent any of the alleged Italian war criminals from being extradited and taken to court. The denial of Italian war crimes was backed up by the Italian state, academe, and media, re-inventing Italy as only a victim of the German Nazism and the post-war Foibe massacres.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The party gained considerable electoral success during the following years and occasionally supplied external support to centre-left governments, although it never directly joined a government. It successfully lobbied Fiat to set up the AvtoVAZ (Lada) car factory in the Soviet Union (1966). The party did best in Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria, where it regularly won the local administrative elections; and in some of the industrialized cities of Northern Italy. At the city government level during the course of the post-war period, the PCI demonstrated (in cities like Bologna and Florence) their capacity for uncorrupt, efficient and clean government. After the elections of 1975, the PCI was the strongest force in nearly all of the municipal councils of the great cities.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 created a split within the PCI. The party leadership, including Palmiro Togliatti and Giorgio Napolitano (who in 2006 became President of the Italian Republic), regarded the Hungarian insurgents as counter-revolutionaries as reported at the time in "l'Unità", the official PCI newspaper. However, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, chief of the communist trade union Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), repudiated the leadership position as did prominent party member Antonio Giolitti and Italian Socialist Party national secretary Pietro Nenni, a close ally of the PCI. Napolitano later hinted at doubts over the propriety of his decision. He would eventually write in "From the Communist Party to European Socialism. A Political Autobiography" ("Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica") that he regretted his justification of the Soviet intervention, but quieted his concerns at the time for the sake of party unity and the international leadership of Soviet Communism. Giolitti and Nenni went on to split with the PCI over this issue. Napolitano became a leading member of the "miglioristi" faction within the PCI which promoted a social-democratic direction in party policy.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In the mid-1960s, the United States State Department estimated the party membership to be approximately 1,350,000 (4.2% of the working age population, making it the largest communist party in per capita terms in the capitalist world at the time and the largest party at all in the whole of Western Europe with the German Social Democratic Party). United States government sources have claimed that the party was receiving $40–50 million per year from the Soviets while the United States investment in Italy was $5–6 million. However, declassified information shows this to be exaggerated, although the PCI relied on Soviet financial assistance more than any other communist party supported by Moscow.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: According to the former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, Longo and other PCI leaders became alarmed at the possibility of a coup in Italy after the Athens Colonel Coup in April 1967. These fears were not completely unfounded as there had been two attempted coups in Italy, Piano Solo in 1964 and Golpe Borghese in 1970, by military and neo-fascist groups. The PCI’s Giorgio Amendola formally requested Soviet assistance to prepare the party in case of such an event. The KGB drew up and implemented a plan to provide the PCI with its own intelligence and clandestine signal corps. From 1967 through 1973, PCI members were sent to East Germany and Moscow to receive training in clandestine warfare and information gathering techniques by both the Stasi and the KGB. Shortly before the May 1972 elections, Longo personally wrote to Leonid Brezhnev asking for and receiving an additional $5.7 million in funding. This was on top of the $3.5 million that the Soviet Union gave the PCI in 1971. The Soviets also provided additional funding through the use of front companies providing generous contracts to PCI members.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In 1969, Enrico Berlinguer, PCI deputy national secretary and later secretary general, took part in the international conference of the Communist parties in Moscow, where his delegation disagreed with the "official" political line and refused to support the final report. Unexpectedly to his hosts, his speech challenged the Communist leadership in Moscow. He refused to "excommunicate" the Chinese Communists and directly told Leonid Brezhnev that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries (which he called the "tragedy in Prague") had made clear the considerable differences within the communist movement on fundamental questions such as national sovereignty, socialist democracy and the freedom of culture. At the time the PCI, which had absorbed the PSI's left-wing, the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, so strengthening its leadership over the Italian left, was the largest communist party in a capitalist state, garnering 34.4% of the vote in the 1976 general election.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: Relationships between the PCI and the Soviet Union gradually fell apart as the party moved away from Soviet obedience and Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy in the 1970s and 1980s and toward Eurocommunism and the Socialist International. The PCI sought a collaboration with Socialist and Christian Democracy parties (the Historic Compromise). However, Christian Democrat party leader Aldo Moro's kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades in May 1978 put an end to any hopes of such a compromise. The compromise was largely abandoned as a PCI policy in 1981. The Proletarian Unity Party merged into the PCI in 1984.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: During the Years of Lead, the PCI strongly opposed the terrorism and the Red Brigades, who in turn murdered or wounded many PCI members or trade unionists close to the PCI. According to Mitrokhin, the party asked the Soviets to pressure the Czechoslovakian State Security (StB) to withdraw their support to the group, which Moscow was unable or unwilling to do. This as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a complete break with Moscow in 1979. In 1980, the PCI refused to participate in the international conference of communist parties in Paris although cash payments to the PCI continued until 1984.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: Achille Occhetto became general secretary of the PCI in 1988. At a 1989 conference in a working-class section of Bologna, Occhetto stunned the party faithful with a speech heralding the end of Communism, a move now referred to in Italian politics as the "svolta della Bolognina" (Bolognina turning point). The collapse of the Communist governments in the Eastern Europe led Occhetto to conclude that the era of Eurocommunism was over. Under his leadership, the PCI dissolved and refounded itself as the Democratic Party of the Left, which branded itself as a progressive left-wing and democratic socialist party. A third of the PCI membership, led by Armando Cossutta, refused to join the PDS and instead seceded to form the Communist Refoundation Party.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: In all its history, the PCI was particularly strong in Central Italy, in the so-called "Red Regions" of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria and Marche, as well as in the industrialized cities of Northern Italy. However, Communists' municipal showcase was Bologna, which was held continuously by the PCI from 1945 onwards. Amongst other measures, the local PCI administration tackled urban problems with successful programmes of health for the elderly, nursery education and traffic reform while also undertaking initiatives in housing and school meal provisions. From 1946 to 1956, the Communist city council built 31 nursery schools, 896 flats and 9 schools. Health care improved substantially, street lighting was installed, new drains and municipal launderettes were built and 8,000 children received subsidised school meals. In 1972, the then-mayor of Bologna, Renato Zangheri, introduced a new and innovative traffic plan with strict limitations for private vehicles and a renewed concentration on cheap public transport. Bologna's social services continued to expand throughout the early and mid-1970s. The city centre was restored, centres for the mentally sick were instituted to help those who had been released from recently closed psychiatric hospitals, handicapped persons were offered training and found suitable jobs, afternoon activities for schoolchildren were made less mindless than the traditional doposcuola (after-school activities) and school programming for the whole day helped working parents. Communists administrations at a local level also helped to aid new businesses while also introducing innovative social reforms.


title: Italian Communist Party

text: The electoral results of the PCI in general (Chamber of Deputies) and European Parliament elections since 1946 are shown in the chart below.


title: Cold medicine

text: Cold medicines are a group of medications taken individually or in combination as a treatment for the symptoms of the common cold and similar conditions of the upper respiratory tract. The term encompasses a broad array of drugs, including analgesics, antihistamines and decongestants, among many others. It also includes drugs which are marketed as cough suppressants or antitussives, but their effectiveness in reducing cough symptoms is unclear or minimal.


title: Cold medicine

text: While they have been used by 10% of American children in any given week, they are not recommended in Canada or the United States in children six years or younger because of lack of evidence showing effect and concerns of harm. In 2020, one version containing codeine and guaifenesin was the 377th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States with more than 400thousand prescriptions.


title: Cold medicine

text: There are a number of different cough and cold medications, which may be used for various coughing symptoms. The commercially available products may include various combinations of any one or more of the following types of substances:


title: Cold medicine

text: The efficacy of cough medication is questionable, particularly in children. A 2014 Cochrane review concluded that "There is no good evidence for or against the effectiveness of OTC medicines in acute cough". Some cough medicines may be no more effective than placebos for acute coughs in adults, including coughs related to upper respiratory tract infections. The American College of Chest Physicians emphasizes that cough medicines are not designed to treat whooping cough, a cough that is caused by bacteria and can last for months. No over-the-counter cough medicines have been found to be effective in cases of pneumonia. They are not recommended in those who have COPD, chronic bronchitis, or the common cold. There is not enough evidence to make recommendations for those who have a cough in cancer.


title: Cold medicine

text: A small study found honey may be a minimally effective cough treatment due to "well-established antioxidant and antimicrobial effects" and a tendency to soothe irritated tissue. A Cochrane review found there was weak evidence to recommend for or against the use of honey in children as a cough remedy. In light of these findings, the Cochrane study they found honey was better than no treatment, placebo, or diphenhydramine but not better than dextromethorphan for relieving cough symptoms. Honey's use as a cough treatment has been linked on several occasions to infantile botulism and accordingly should not be used in children less than one year old.


title: Cold medicine

text: Many alternative treatments are used to treat the common cold, though data on effectiveness is generally limited. A 2007 review states that, "alternative therapies (i.e., Echinacea, vitamin C, and zinc) are not recommended for treating common cold symptoms; however...Vitamin C prophylaxis may modestly reduce the duration and severity of the common cold in the general population and may reduce the incidence of the illness in persons exposed to physical and environmental stresses." A 2014 review also found insufficient evidence for Echinacea, where no clinical relevance was proven to provide benefit for treating the common cold, despite a weak benefit for positive trends. Similarly, a 2014 systematic review showed that garlic may prevent occurrences of the common cold but there was insufficient evidence of garlic in treating the common cold and studies reported adverse effects of a rash and odour. Therefore, more research need to be done to prove that the benefits out weight the harms.


title: Cold medicine

text: A 2009 review found that the evidence supporting the effectiveness of zinc is mixed with respect to cough, and a 2011 Cochrane review concluded that zinc "administered within 24 hours of onset of symptoms reduces the duration and severity of the common cold in healthy people". A 2003 review concluded: "Clinical trial data support the value of zinc in reducing the duration and severity of symptoms of the common cold when administered within 24 hours of the onset of common cold symptoms." Zinc gel in the nose may lead to long-term or permanent loss of smell. The FDA therefore discourages its use.


title: Cold medicine

text: Cough medicines, especially those containing dextromethorphan and codeine, are often abused as recreational drugs. Abuse may result in hallucinations, loss of consciousness and death.


title: Cold medicine

text: A number of accidental overdoses and well-documented adverse effects suggested caution in children. The FDA in 2015 warned that the use of codeine-containing cough medication in children may cause breathing problems. Cold syrup overdose has been linked to visual and auditory hallucinations as well as rapid involuntary jaw, tongue, and eye movements in children.


title: Cold medicine

text: Decongestants are possibly harmful to people with high blood pressure or a heart disease because these substances can constrict the blood vessels.


title: Cold medicine

text: Heroin was originally marketed as a cough suppressant in 1898. It was, at the time, believed to be a non-addictive alternative to other opiate-containing cough syrups. This was quickly realized not to be true as heroin readily breaks down into morphine in the body. Morphine was already known to be addictive.


title: Cold medicine

text: Some brand names include: Benilyn, Sudafed, Robitussin and Vicks among others. Most contain a number of active ingredients.


title: Cold medicine

text: Sudafed is a brand manufactured by McNeil Laboratories. The original formulation contains the active ingredient pseudoephedrine, but formulations without pseudoephedrine are also being sold under the brand. In 2016, it was one of the biggest selling branded over-the-counter medications sold in Great Britain, with sales of £34.4 million. The effectiveness of phenylephrine by mouth as a nasal decongestant is questionable.


title: Cold medicine

text: Gee's Linctus is a cough medicine which contains opium tincture. New Zealand in 2019 moved it to prescription only.


title: Cold medicine

text: Coricidin, Coricidin D, or Coricidin HBP, is the brand name of a combination of dextromethorphan and chlorpheniramine maleate (an antihistamine). Varieties may also contain acetaminophen and guaifenesin.


title: Cold medicine

text: Codral is a brand name manufactured by Johnson & Johnson and sold primarily in Australia and New Zealand. Codral is the highest-selling cold and flu medication in Australia.


title: Cold medicine

text: According to "The New York Times", at least eight mass poisonings have occurred as a result of counterfeit cough syrup in which medical-grade glycerin has been replaced with diethylene glycol, an inexpensive, yet toxic, glycerin substitute marketed for industrial use. In May 2007, 365 deaths were reported in Panama, which were associated with cough syrup containing diethylene glycol. In 2022, the deaths of 66 children in The Gambia were linked to four pediatric cough syrup medications that contained diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol.


title: Cold medicine

text: In 2022, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against cooking foods in cough syrup, after a video of someone preparing "NyQuil chicken" became popular on social media. Cough syrup is designed to be stored at room temperature and its properties can change when it is heated, making it potentially deadly. Heated cough syrup can also vaporize, leading to inhalation hazards.


title: Bass (fish)

text: Bass () is a name shared by many species of fish. The term encompasses both freshwater and marine species, all belonging to the large order Perciformes, or perch-like fishes. The word "bass" comes from Middle English , meaning 'perch'.


title: Bass (fish)

text: It is also very popular in South Africa. In the country, largemouth bass is often found in lakes, rivers, creeks, and dams.


title: Bass (fish)

text: When fishing, lures (Bass worms) or live bait will work. Lures that mimic baitfish, worms, crayfish, frogs, and mice are all effective.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: The Lennon Sisters are an American vocal group made up of four sisters. The quartet originally consisted of Dianne (aka DeeDee; born Dianne Barbara, December 1, 1939), Peggy (born Margaret Anne, April 8, 1941), Kathy (born Kathleen Mary, August 2, 1943), and Janet (born Janet Elizabeth, June 15, 1946). From 1955 to 1968, the group appeared regularly on "The Lawrence Welk Show" (receiving union scale wages) before having their own television variety show, called "Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters", with Jimmy Durante. After the show was cancelled, they partnered with Andy Williams to create a successful Las Vegas residency, which lasted a decade. In 1999, younger sister Mimi (born Miriam Theresa, October 16, 1955) replaced Peggy upon the latter's retirement. DeeDee has also since retired. The current line-up of the Lennon Sisters is a trio consisting of Kathy, Janet, and Mimi. They continue to tour around the country and, until recently, performed annually with their Christmas show at The Andy Williams Moon River Theatre in Branson, Missouri.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: The Lennon Sisters were born into a family of twelve children (seven sisters and five brothers), all born in Los Angeles, California. Their youngest sister, Mary Frances, died as infant in 1954. Their parents married in early 1939. Their father, William Herbert Lennon (1915–1969), worked as a milkman for many years before getting a job at a local golf course. Their mother, Isabelle Emily "Sis" (1919–2005), remained at home to care for the needs of her very large family. Sis was the daughter of Reina Ysabella Alvarez Denning and Danforth Denning. Their ancestry was a mixture of Mexican, Spanish, German, and Irish. Isabelle's maternal grandfather, Pablo Alvarez (1857–1905), was born in Santa Ana, California, and her maternal grandmother, Margarita Camacho (1864–1938), was from Wilmington, California. Pablo's great-great-great-grandfather, Bernardo Salgado De Oliberos, was born in San Andrés, Spain.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: During their formative years, the family, which included two parents, eleven children, and one grandmother, lived in Venice, California, in a modest two-bedroom home. They were and are devout Roman Catholics and attended the Church of St. Mark, which is part of the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Most or all of the children attended Catholic school. Throughout the Lennon Sisters' career, their faith has had a major influence in both their lives and their careers. Many of their songs are either hymns or of a religious or spiritual nature.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: The quartet made its television debut on "The Lawrence Welk Show" on Christmas Eve 1955. A high school classmate, Larry Welk, son of Lawrence Welk, brought them to the attention of his father. Welk was at home, sick in bed, when his son brought the sisters in to sing for him. Welk was so impressed that he immediately booked them for that week's show, where they were a mainstay until they left to start a career of their own in 1968. The quartet was a trio from 1960 to 1964 after DeeDee married and left the group; she rejoined in 1964 (although making a small handful of appearances throughout her years not on the show). Peggy sang the high harmony, Kathy the low harmony, and Janet and DeeDee sang the middle and lead harmonies. Peggy also specialized in barbershop, or counter-harmony, singing, taught to her by her father (who performed during the Big Band Era in a quartet with his own three brothers). The girls idolized Patti Page's multi-track vocal sound, feeling they achieved something close to her smooth blend in their Dot recording of "Stars Fell on Alabama". Kathy was especially fond of Connie Francis, evident in her solo recording of "Malaguena", which showcased her impressive vocal range. And also with the numerous hairstyles that Kathy would wear like her signature “swept wing look”. The sisters made no secret that they were huge fans of the innovative, intricate musical stylings of both The Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: Their first hit, "Tonight, You Belong to Me", reached No. 15 on the charts in 1956. In 1961, their single "Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)" (Dot 16255) reached the top of the charts in Japan, although making it only to No. 56 on Billboard in the United States. It was the lone No. 1 single of their career, turning out to be their all-time highest-charting record. Although much of the group's fame was based on their television appearances, they also recorded frequently for Dot Records in the 1950s and 1960s, producing a dozen albums, featuring their interpretations of well-known standards such as "Among My Souvenirs", "Moon River", and "Twilight Time". Some of their best-known recordings included "Scarlet Ribbons", "Greensleeves", and Schubert's "Ave Maria". A themed LP titled "Dominique" featured the Lennon Sisters with their musically talented siblings and cousins performing a variety of 1960s folk songs, including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "If I Had My Way (The Sermon of Samson)", as well as the title track. They recorded briefly for Mercury Records after leaving Dot, focusing on more contemporary pop/light-rock fare, such as "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" and "Never My Love". Their three most popular albums were "Lawrence Welk Presents The Lennon Sisters: Best-Loved Catholic Hymns" (Dot); "Christmas with The Lennon Sisters" (Dot); and "Noel", their Christmas album for Mercury Records. Their full-bodied, homestyle choral blend was perfect for such yuletide favorites as "Adeste Fideles", "Christmas Island", "Faith of Our Fathers", "The Star Carol", and "Home for the Holidays".


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: Several souvenir items, such as coloring books, paper dolls, and story books featuring the Lennon sisters, were produced.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: Having growing families, the sisters were only receiving Union scale wages for their jobs on the show. The Lennons and Lawrence Welk would agree that the sisters would appear on the show only once a month starting in 1967 so the sisters could pursue other opportunities and earn a bit more income for their families. However, over time this agreement would not work for Lawrence and in February 1968 the sisters were let go from the show. Singing the song “Sweet and Low” the Lennons and Welk would go their separate ways.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: In summer 1969, the Lennon Sisters were filming episodes for their upcoming variety series, "Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters Hour". After filming five episodes, the Lennon Sisters went on a two-week hiatus.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: On August 12, 1969, their father, William Lennon, was shot and killed in the parking lot of the Venice Golf Course in Marina Del Rey, where he worked as a private instructor. Shortly before his death, Lennon had retired from managing his daughters' careers; he had been on set at every one of their television appearances since 1955. William Lennon was killed by a former Air Force officer named Chet Young. Young, who had previously been committed to Atascadero State Hospital and judged to be “dangerously insane”, believed that he was married to Peggy and was convinced that William Lennon stood in the way of his "marriage" to Peggy and had to be eliminated. Two months later, Young used the same weapon on himself to commit suicide. The sisters discovered an unopened letter containing a cut-out of their father, a picture of a gun pointed at his head, and the words "High Noon" (the time of the murder). The sisters were devastated by their father's death, and in the wake of the murder, their new show was impacted by this tragedy and lasted only one and a half seasons.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: In the 1970s, the sisters performed regularly on "The Andy Williams Show", and when that show ended in 1971, the sisters would tour around with Williams across the country, with engagements including Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. They had a successful floor show with Williams in Las Vegas for about ten years. They also appeared on several game shows, including "Family Feud", "Tattletales", and "The Hollywood Squares". In the spring of 1982, Larry Welk asked the Lennon Sisters if they would like to perform at the Welk Theater from May until New Year's Eve for the Branson entertainment season. The four sisters moved their families from the Los Angeles area to Branson, Missouri. After the death of Lawrence Welk on May 17, 1992, the Lennon Sisters quartet headlined at the Welk Champagne Theater in Branson from 1994 to 2012. When Peggy retired from singing in 1999, younger sister Mimi took her place, and when Dianne left for a second time in 2001, the act was a trio again for the rest of its run in Branson. They continue to tour across the country and appear annually with their Christmas show at The Andy Williams Moon River Theatre, marking twenty consecutive years of performing in Branson.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: Other than their thirteen years on "The Lawrence Welk Show", the sister group would appear on many other different shows throughout the years, including "The Ed Sullivan Show", "The John Davidson Show", "The Andy Williams Show", "Celebrity Bowling", "The Jim Nabors Hour", "Cher", "Password Plus" (Janet Lennon only), and "The Merv Griffin Show".


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: While continuing to play tour dates, Kathy and Janet Lennon have branched out into the toy market in 2006, designing and selling a line of "Best Pals" dolls. In addition to the dolls, the sisters have recorded CDs of favorite children's songs for the "Best Pals" line.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: The four original Lennon Sisters wrote an autobiography titled "Same Song, Separate Voices", first published in 1985, with a new edition in 1995. In 2011 "The Lennon Sisters: Same Separate Voices", (using the same name as the book) was a musical documentary celebrating the group's fifty five years in show business, aired on PBS. Although a updated version of the tv special was aired on PBS in 2020.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: Two of their five brothers, Kipp and Pat Lennon, are members of the band Venice, which also includes their cousins Michael and Mark Lennon.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: The Lennon Sisters have frequented The Villages, the world's largest retirement community, for shows. They last performed in The Villages on February 15, 2016.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: The Lennon Sisters were among hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.


title: The Lennon Sisters

text: In recent years, the Lennon sisters have gained new popularity, as four of their popular songs, "Tonight, You Belong to Me" (1956), “Que Sera Sera” (1956), "My Favorite Things" (1965), and “Somethin' Stupid" (1967) have gained hundreds of thousands to millions of view on YouTube. This is in part due to the fact that the song was played in the show "American Horror Story" in 2011 although it was another artist's rendition of the song, the popularity still reached the Lennon Sisters version too.


title: Trident (UK nuclear programme)

text: Trident, also known as the Trident nuclear programme or Trident nuclear deterrent, covers the development, procurement and operation of nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom and their means of delivery. Its purpose as stated by the Ministry of Defence is to "deter the most extreme threats to our national security and way of life, which cannot be done by other means". Trident is an operational system of four s armed with Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles, able to deliver thermonuclear warheads from multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). It is operated by the Royal Navy and based at Clyde Naval Base on the west coast of Scotland. At least one submarine is always on patrol to provide a continuous at-sea capability. Each one carries no more than eight missiles and forty warheads, although their capacity is higher. The missiles are manufactured in the United States, while the warheads are British.


title: Trident (UK nuclear programme)

text: The British government initially negotiated with the Carter administration for the purchase of the Trident I C-4 missile. In 1981, the Reagan administration announced its decision to upgrade its Trident to the new Trident II D-5 missile. This necessitated another round of negotiations and concessions. The UK Trident programme was announced in July 1980 and patrols began in December 1994. Trident replaced the submarine-based Polaris system, in operation from 1968 until 1996. Trident is the only nuclear weapon system operated by the UK since the decommissioning of tactical WE.177 free-fall bombs in 1998.


title: Trident (UK nuclear programme)

text: NATO's military posture was relaxed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Trident warheads have never been aimed at specific targets on an operational patrol, but await co-ordinates that can be programmed into their computers and fired with several days' notice. Although Trident was designed as a strategic deterrent, the end of the Cold War led the British government to conclude that a sub-strategic—but not tactical—role was required.


title: Trident (UK nuclear programme)

text: A programme for the replacement of the "Vanguard" class is under way. On 18 July 2016 the House of Commons voted by a large majority to proceed with building a fleet of s, to be operational by 2028, with the current fleet completely phased out by 2032.