Yugoslavian armored units 1940-1945

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The Kingdom of Italy had already possessed the Dodecanese Islands since 1912 and it had the protectorate over Albania since 1926 and, with the This volume tells the almost unknown story of Yugoslav tankers from training to the Second World War. The formation of the first armored units of the Army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia dates back to the late 1920s, when military authorities felt the need to equip the units with an armored component, on the basis of the experiences lived during the Great War by the armies engaged in trench warfare. Contrary to what happened with many other European armies at that time, these armored units did not develop as an extension of the cavalry divisions but were instead formed as independent departments, officially called Combat Units.

With these departments, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia faced the Second World War. After the Italian-German invasion of 1941, Independent Croatia and Slovenian collaborative forces formed armored units, employed in the anti-partisan struggle, and the Wehrmacht formed 3 Armored Divisions formed by Croatian volunteers assumptions, after the occupation of the Kingdom of Albania in 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War the following year, Mussolini concentrated his efforts against Greece, starting in October 1940 a disastrous military campaign, which forced the German Reich to a massive intervention in support of the Italian Armed Forces in the Balkans. The Italian military weakness thus transformed what could be considered for Italy a parallel war to secure control of Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia, in a war subordinate to Germany.

This volume analyzes the history of the armored units engaged in the Balkans by the Royal Army and, after 8 September 1943, by the units of the Italian Social Republic, by the German, Croatian, Slovenian and partisan units, which after the Armistice recovered a large part of the abandoned armored vehicles of Italian Army.