Radio Dispatches of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland 1941 – 1942

The monograph “Radio Dispatches of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland 1941 – 1942”, published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, is the result of the aspirations of three historians, Rado Ristanović, PhD, Milutin Živković, PhD and MA Miloš Čorbić, to present to the professional and public inaccessible archival material, as well as to fill the decades-long historiographical gap on the activities of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland.

In this collection of documents of 1018 pages, there are hundreds of typed and prepared radio dispatches that were received and sent by the Supreme Command of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland during 1942. Radio dispatches preserved in the Military Archives in Belgrade have been used only sporadically and partially in historiography for decades. These documents refer to the entire territory of the occupied Kingdom of Yugoslavia and to various aspects of warfare and everyday life in the war: personnel policy in the army, revenge and repression of the occupiers, propaganda, monetary disorder, daily dealing with scarcity, etc.

Of great importance for a wider circle of interested readers is the overview map of the formation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland corps and the introductory study in which the authors, using relevant literature and numerous archival sources, presented the complex historical context in which the documents were created. They researched, reconstructed, and presented the analysis of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland communication system with great care, which is a novelty in Serbian historiography. In most of the dispatches, personal names are written in encrypted form, which led the authors to decipher, systematize and publish a list of names on 25 pages in the form of attachments with a clear explanation and codebook. Thirteen photographs and the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland Radio Communication Scheme have visually and substantively enriched this unique monograph.

Reviewers Academician Ljubodrag Dimić, Bojan Dimitrijević, PhD and Petar Ristanović, PhD along with the editor-in-chief Predrag Marković, PhD stood behind this historiographically valuable edition, which will be an unavoidable determinant in further research of World War II in the former Yugoslavia. .