Embattled Kingdom: The South Slav Wartime Generation in Yugoslavia, 1918–45

The subject of this paper is the male wartime generation in Yugoslavia: the generation of men who fought or served in the Serbian, Montenegrin, or Austro-Hungarian armies during the First World War and the Balkan wars, a cohort that was hugely influential in the social and cultural history of interwar Yugoslavia. Its central argument is that most members of this generation were unable to fully ‘demobilize’ from war. ‘Demobilization’ is used here in its broadest sense, meaning not only ‘military demobilization’, that is, the necessary process of reducing an army raised for war into a peacetime force, but also ‘cultural demobilization’, the disengagement of wartime mentalities through which people are motivated to fight (Horne, 2002). There was a special urgency to this process in Yugoslavia: cultural demobilization was necessary to create a viable nation-state, to turn South Slavs mobilized against one another during the war into ‘Yugoslav’ subjects in the post-war period. Divisions, antagonisms, and violence in Yugoslavia are attributed to the presence of a generation of men whose experiences and memory of wartime mobilization and of post-war demobilization were vastly different. This paper shows how members of the wartime generation, frustrated first by the failures of the parliamentary system and then again by the failures of the authoritarian regime that replaced it, went on to play a pivotal role in the establishment and ideological organization of groups that contested the civil war in Yugoslavia during 1941-1945. Specifically, it will show how members of the wartime generation made important contributions to the programmes of the Croatian paramilitary/fascist group the ‘Ustashe’ and the ‘Yugoslav Army in the Homeland’ (the Serbian Chetniks). In both these organizations, the memory of sacrifice and suffering during the First World War acted as an important catalyst to a new wave of conflict between South Slavs.