Yugoslavia, Serbia. Four Second War Chetnik Photographs

Three photos illustrate small groups of soldiers, while the other photo features a howitzer with one soldier beside it. All are in black and white, two with a matte finish, two with a semi-gloss finish, all with postcard style backers, two with a scalloped border, the other two with straight edges, varying in size from 117 mm (w) x 83 mm (h) to 140 mm (w) x 90 mm (h), one of which exhibits extensive soiling and fraying, the other free of major flaws, ranging from poor to near extremely fine.

Footnote: At 5:12 a.m. on April 6, 1941, German, Italian and Hungarian forces invaded Yugoslavia. The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) bombed Belgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. On April 17th, representatives of Yugoslavia's various regions signed an armistice with Germany in Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance against the invading German forces. More than 300,000 Yugoslav officers and soldiers were taken prisoner. The Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi satellite state, ruled by the fascist militia known as the Ustaše that came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy. From 1941 to 1945, the Croatian Ustaše regime murdered around 500,000 people, 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism. From the start, the Yugoslav resistance forces consisted of two factions: the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and the royalist Chetniks, with the former receiving Allied recognition only at the Tehran conference (1943). The heavily pro-Serbian Chetniks were led by Draža Mihajlović, while the pan-Yugoslav oriented Partisans were led by Josip Broz Tito.