Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jul 12, 2017

Tias fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Jul 12, 2017

• Members of the communist youth organization often had a stick up their collective asses and kept trying to sabotage attempts of the older guys and gals to have some fun during downtime.
  
• There was a number of Domobrani (Croatian Home Guard, basically horribly untrained, unmotivated and underequipped conscripts used as the regular military of the fascist NDH. Mind you they weren't a, uh, clean not-wermacht, but many of them were only there because the alternative was ending up in an Ustaše run prison) who ended up getting captured and released so many times by the Partizans that the Partizans started giving them wishlists of stuff they'd like them to try to have on them the next time they're captured. Domobrani were sometimes jokingly referred to by the Partizans as "our armory".
  
• A Partizan artillery guy getting ridiculously angry at Ustaše gunners miles away who kept wildly missing with their barrages, and ranting about how that is inexcusable incompetence and a frivolous waste of good shells that would bring shame to any true artilleryman - until someone reminded him that the alternative to the Ustaše missing was them, you know, actually hitting. The guy then got sad and complained that if the Ustaše kept firing at that rate, then by the time the infantry managed to capture those guns from them there wouldn't be any new ammunition left for him to use.
  

• When some local Četniks found out that one of the wounded Partizans they captured was a Croat, they paraded him around their village while stabbing him in places where it wouldn't kill him right away, and ranted about him being clear evidence of the Partizans being a pack of Croatian infiltrators betraying the Serbian people to the enemy. Worth noting for hilarious hypocrisy, the Italian garrison the Četniks were on nice terms with was right there all along. (As an aside, I always have a problem when I want to talk about the Četniks because while it's a fact that some of them fought the Nazis, and weren't necessarily a pack of genocidal assholes, the ones in the areas my family comes from were complete and utter scum.)
  
• It was not unusual for women Partizans to be careful to save their last bullet when at risk of getting captured alive by fascist/nationalist militias.
  
• In general, the poo poo Ustaše did to anyone they captured alive. The Italians enjoyed torching villages for a bit of sport, and the Četniks in that area were a bunch of drunken, murderous yahoos who could give Heygal's guys a run for the money, and rape someone on the way back, but the Ustaše were so insanely obsessed with torture that it genuinely put a massive dent in their combat effectiveness (Adolf motherfucking Hitler later sent their leader a message telling him that they need to knock that poo poo off. They ignored him). There's a constant theme of Ustaše beelining for wounded Partizans and taking huge casualties getting shot/stabbed/blown up as they attempt to subdue them for later fun. Ustaše regularly fell into traps laid by planting a rumor that there's an unprotected hospital or refugee shelter somewhere. One of the local Partizan commanders only survived being captured by the Ustaše because they spent a week breaking his ribs, ripping out his nails, and peeling off his skin instead of handing him over to the Germans for interrogation, and was saved by a surprise raid.
  

• Political commissars had an insanely complex job that was somewhat of a compromise between keeping morale high, communist propaganda, befriending the troops, being an example in combat, being an atheist priest of sorts, making sure there's enough discipline and that there is a line that is never crossed (and making sure everyone is aware of exactly what happens to you if you cross it), and surviving. People who were dumb, cruel, or inflexible didn't last long in that job.
  
• The Partizans managed to pull off some insanely lopsided victories, especially early on when nobody actually expected facing serious organized resistance. For example, one group of less than 200 Partizans armed only with rifles and a small number of hand grenades ambushed an Italian column of roughly a thousand men, and when the fighting was over, there were over 400 Italian corpses left in the snow, along with a pair of light tanks abandoned undamaged in the panic, and a fuckton of rifles, mortars, machine guns, and ammo, and even some towed artillery. Partizan casualties? One fighter dead, two wounded. Though the Italians had the last laugh of sorts wrt the tanks, since they were piles of crap that broke down the first time the Partizans tried to use them in combat.
  
• The Partizans weren't immune to making incredibly dumb mistakes, like when someone high up had the bright idea that it would be awesome if there was a big win on the anniversary of the October Revolution, and ordered a hasty, disorganized attack on fortified fascist positions, with predictable results.
  

my dad fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jul 12, 2017

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jul 12, 2017

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jul 12, 2017