Challenges in Coalition Unconventional Warfare: The Allied Campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945

Abstract

During World War II, operatives and military advisors of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a precursor to both the current Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces, conducted a challenging unconventional warfare (UW) campaign against the Axis forces with and through guerrilla resistance elements in Yugoslavia. The resistance movement effectively fixed in place 35 German and Italian divisions, consisting of roughly 660,000 soldiers in the western Balkan region during 1941 1945. This campaign rendered them strategically irrelevant by preventing their use in other theaters. The combined United Kingdom (UK) United States (U.S.) contingent achieved this effect with never more than 100 Allied personnel on the ground in the denied area. The number of Axis personnel killed in the Balkans is estimated at 450,000.2 This extremely favorable force ratio and its associated effects commend UW as a low-cost, high-reward method of warfare.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2014
Accession Number
ADA622239

Entities

People

  • Christopher J. Conover
  • J. D. Duke
  • Rex L. Phillips

Organizations

  • National Defense University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Civil War
  • Cold War
  • Eastern Europe
  • Europe
  • Governments
  • Green Berets
  • Military Science
  • Military Training
  • National Security
  • Second World War
  • Security
  • Special Operations Forces
  • Training
  • Unconventional Warfare
  • United States
  • Warfare
  • Yugoslavia

Readers

  • European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP).
  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.
  • Strategic Security Studies