Two volunteer regiments, and a mobile Gendarmerie Brigade were also established; but, by November 1942, the partisans had occupied northern Bosnia, and the Army could only hold main towns and communications routes, abandoning the countryside.

[8] The small Navy of the Independent State of Croatia (Ratna Mornarica Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, or RMNDH) was limited by a special treaty with Fascist Italy.

Chiefs of the General Staff included: Despite being the best-armed and having the best logistics and infrastructure of all the domestic military formations in the World War II Balkans, the Croatian Home Guard failed to become an efficient fighting force for a variety of reasons.

Although initially significant numbers of ethnic Croat officers from the old Yugoslav army joined the Croatian Home Guard, most not entirely voluntarily, they were mistrusted by the new Ustaše puppet regime.

[12] NDH authorities tried to remedy this by forming officer schools and having junior staff trained in Italy and Germany, but effects of this policy came too late to affect the outcome of the war.

Third and, arguably, most important reason, the gradual decline in support for the Ustaše regime among ethnic Croats, first fuelled by the abandonment of Dalmatia to Italy, then by the prospect of Home Guard troops being used by the Germans as cannon fodder on the Eastern Front – a repeat of the same traumatic experience from the First World War.

Domobrani dissention, over the sadistic policies of the Ustaše, led to the outright persecution, deportation, and murder of Home Guard soldiers within the Jasenovac concentration camp system.

Yugoslav Partisans, who were based on non-sectarian ideology and had Croatian statehood as part of their pretext, were more successful in making inroads into the Home Guard than Serb-dominated Chetniks.

Following the capitulation of Italy in September 1943 and the first aid shipments from the Western Allies, the military situation in Yugoslavia began to even more dramatically shift in favour of the Partisans.

By mid-1944, many Home Guard personnel and units began to openly side with Partisans, leading to some instances of mass defections that included battalion-size formations as well as some ZNDH aircraft.

[8] Securing the rear areas were some 32,000 men of the Croatian Gendarmerie (Hrvatsko Oruznistvo), organised into five police volunteer regiments plus 15 independent battalions, equipped with standard light infantry weapons, including mortars.

[18] In May 1945, following the final Partisan offensive and collapse of the NDH, remaining Home Guard units joined other Axis forces and civilian refugees in the last desperate attempt to seek shelter among Western Allies.

Those Home Guards who survived the ordeal, as well as members of their families, were mostly treated as second-class citizens in Tito's Yugoslavia, although there were some exceptions, most notably with the legendary sportscaster Mladen Delić.