ahura said:
hmm if we look at the history italian were never good soldiers, not in the
I.ww, and II.ww they sucked even more...
hmm so in your timeline pavelic didnt declared all treatys with italy as invalid 1943. when italy capitulated? (after the cap. allmost all italian soldiers retreted)
if not, why? doesnt make sense (logical) imo...
When I look at Italy´s military history, I conclude that the main reasons for the failures of the Italian Army were poor leadership combined with obsolete weaponry and organization. Still they developed the first assault rifle (Cei-Rigotti), one of the first submachine guns (Villar-Perosa), and by 1917 they had recovered from their earlier devastating losses and had developed their own stormtroops, the "Arditi" of
Reparti d'Assalto. In WWII Il Duce and the dumbass Italian generals did their best to make the Italian Army look bad, but they still had some excellent divisions and special forces.
And Pavelic wasn´t in a position to annex Dalmatian coast simply because Germans didin´t allow it, simple as that. Why would the Germans have wanted to weaken their most important ally in such a critical moment to please a minor Axis puppet state? Especially when new troops became available from the former Ostfront, further diminishing the importance of Croatia in the Balkans. And with Soviet Union out from the war there were more Italian soldiers willing to fight on in 1943 since the war didin´t seem lost as in OTL.
ahura said:
if we compare the situation from 1991.-1995. when we fought against the peoples army of jugoslavia (3rd or 4th army in europe at that time) and chetinik paramilitary forces, and see that we defeated them, even we had at the beginning not even a military force, and to top this croatian was under a un weapons embargo... this is about fighting morale, and the will for victory...
Why should we compare this hypothetical situation to a completely different real-life war? Especially a one where VJ initially basically did what it wanted by ruthlessly occupying large parts of Croatia (namely Krajina) despite fierce Croat resistance. Then Vance Plan turned the conflict into low-scale trench warfare with uneasy truces and occasional clashes while the Croatian forces were greatly reinforced and expanded as the country managed to aquire foreign weapons and receive help from American contractors (MPRI) with the approval of Clinton Administration. When August 1995 came, Milošević had allready abanoned RSK to it´s fate and the VSK had only about 55,000 soldiers available to cover a front of some 700km, so the success of
Oluja was quite expected.
ahura said:
plus, if we keep in mind that around 1945. the HOS (croatian armed forces) had about 200,000 soldiers (croatian and british sources)...
1945 is two years later than 1943. And Croatia was still too isolated and dependant from German help and goodwill to openly challenge them.
ahura said:
then look at your ftl, with a rsi or "disabled italy", its doesnt seems logical that "we" couldnt beat them...(imo the war would take in the worst case 5-10 years max)... but the final victory is unquastionable...
RSI still has way larger population and bigger GNP. Just compare the situation to Cold War-era Soviet sphere of influence in TTL. Sure, the Hungarians didin´t like Romanian ownership of Transylvania one bit - but were not in a position to do anything about it. Same applies here, the Reich has shown that it´s willing to interfere to any local crisis to ensure "stability and order among the free European family of nations."
ahura said:
concerning the assination attempt, it failed... pavelic died peacefuly in madrid 1959... so i havent connected this two events...
o
When Pavelic died, he still had the assasin´s bullet lodged in his spine.