Brian R. Johnson

"The book provides a refreshing look at a theater of war that is neglected by contemporary culture. Ironically, this book had more relevance to our last twenty years of war than Normandy or Ardennes. I got flashbacks of Iraq and Afghanistan reading about the machinations of the sectarian conflict of the former Yugoslavia and greater Balkans." – Military Review On April 6, 1941, German troops along with Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian military units invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In less than two weeks the Kingdom would be defeated, setting the stage for a bloody civil war that the occupying Axis forces desperately tried—and needed—to control. Based on years of research, this book provides a distinctive account of what happened in the relatively unknown and under-researched Yugoslavian theater of conflict in World War II. Based on the detailed diaries of Gottfried Weber, a naïve patriotic teen from a small town in Saxony who is willingly drafted into the German Wehrmacht and sent to Yugoslavia for occupation duty. This is the story of an emerging adult struggling to keep a sense of youthful normalcy during war, balancing friendships and romance with his daily life in combat and trying to stay alive. But the book is more. Weber's accounts are woven into the historical record, while personal interviews from his comrades and enemies that he fought against provide the reader with firsthand accounts of the horrors and humanity of common foot soldiers in WWII Yugoslavia. Combined with an extensive number of photographs, some of which were taken by Weber, the people, land, and war that the Axis and Allied fighters were exposed to is brought to life. Weber's war-time travels are also re-traced in the 21st century to connect the past with the present, revealing that the scars and memories of WWII are still present with the peoples and land that Winston Churchill coined the soft underbelly of Europe.

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