The Seven Enemy Offensives (Serbo-Croatian Latin: Sedam neprijateljskih ofanziva) is a group name used in Yugoslav historiography to refer to seven major Axis military operations undertaken during World War IIinYugoslavia against the Yugoslav Partisans.
These seven major offensives were distinct from the day-to-day warfare that went on in every part of the country; and they were distinct, too, from planned operations involving large numbers of troops against isolated regions. The seven offensives were seven different attempts by carefully planned, co-ordinated, and extensive manoeuvres to annihilate the main core of partisan resistance.[1]
The Seven Enemy Offensives are:
By the end of the seventh offensive, the greater part of Yugoslavia was securely in partisan hands.[2]
It was the nature of partisan resistance that operations against it must either eliminate it altogether or leave it potentially stronger than before. This had been shown by the sequel to each of the previous five offensives from which, one after another, the partisan brigades and divisions had emerged stronger in experience and armament than they had been before, with the backing of a population which had come to see no alternative to resistance but death, imprisonment, or starvation. There could be no half-measures; the Germans left nothing behind them but a trail of ruin. What in other circumstances might possibly have remained the purely ideological war that reactionaries abroad said it was (and German propaganda did their utmost to support them) became a war for national preservation. So clear was this that no room was left for provincialism; Serbs and Croats and Slovenes, Macedonians, Bosnians, Christian and Moslem, Orthodox and Catholic, sank their differences in the sheer desperation of striving to remain alive.[3]
