direct

hit, 350,000 books, 500,000 journals, and many historical manuscripts went up in
flames.2
Bombs also struck hospitals and schools, which caught fire or collapsed. One bomb hit the
Church of Assumption, killing and maiming members of a wedding party. The effects of the
bombing campaign were even more devastating because April 6 was a Sunday, when the city
markets were full of people. The German military attaché in Belgrade, Colonel Rudolf
Toussaint, recorded that the assault caught many residents still asleep and the “air-attack
inflicted particularly heavy casualties; psychological impact was enormous…. People, whose
homes were destroyed, ran distractedly through the streets, exacerbating panic.” Masses of
refugees streamed out of the city.3
Armed with small-caliber guns, Yugoslav antiaircraft forces proved utterly ineffective. The
Royal Yugoslav Air Force could field 459 planes, most of them outdated, while the Luftwaffe
alone committed almost a thousand aircraft. Stationed near Belgrade, a royal air force regiment
had forty-three planes, and its pilots fought bravely, shooting down ten German aircraft, but
were overwhelmed by hundreds of enemy fighters.4 On April 11–12 the Luftwaffe subjected
the capital to another severe attack. Other cities were also bombed; nine hundred people were
killed and wounded in Niš.5
The air assault was followed by a rapid offensive by Axis land forces, fully mobilized and
well-equipped German and Italian divisions. On paper, the Yugoslav army had a fair chance: it
had thirty divisions and nine brigades (about 800,000 men), roughly equal to the strength of the
enemy. In reality, however, it was woefully unprepared to fight a modern war; only eleven
divisions were at full strength.6
As a result, the Blitzkrieg shocked everyone who remembered the fighting prowess of the
Serbian army in 1914–15, when it stood up against combined German, Austro-Hungarian, and
Bulgarian forces. In sharp contrast to such a heroic past, the Royal Yugoslav Army collapsed
within a matter of days. While some units stood their ground, such valor only accentuated the
prevailing atmosphere of panic and demoralization. The German propaganda detachments
disseminated leaflets that appealed to the Croat and Slovene units to stop fighting for “Serbian
chauvinism and English interests.” Many soldiers dropped their weapons and went home. On
April 10, 1941, in Zagreb, the nationalist Ustasha organization proclaimed the creation of the
independent Croatian state (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The Albanian separatists in
Kosovo and Metohija and ethnic Germans in Banat and northern Serbia carried out sabotage
acts in the rear of the Yugoslav army and provided intelligence for advancing Italian and
German troops.7
Exaggerated rumors of a “fifth column” led to arrests of individuals who merely looked
suspicious. Even decades later, this aspect of the region's history played out in the collective
memory. Directed by Aleksandar Petrović, the 1963 Yugoslav film Three opens with a scene
of an army patrol seizing an alleged subversive at a rail station. The suspect's guilt is
determined solely by the facts that he has a burr and a camera. Edged on by a scared and
frenzied crowd, the patrol shoots the man and tosses his body into a ditch. In April 1941, such
scenes were common, and a contemporary recalled that treason seemed to be everywhere,
committed by “‘fifth columnists,’ Croats, ethnic Germans, and Russian émigrés.”8