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| Partisan hospitals |
During the People's Liberation War in Yugoslavia, under the extreme conditions of guerrilla warfare, partisan medical services performed a key strategic role in providing care for the sick and the wounded, saving thousands of civilian lives and returning thousands back into the battle. Although the presence of the wounded can have a crippling effect on the operational capacity of an army, the testament to People's Liberation Army's ethos of care is that the fiercest battles of WWII — the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska — were fought with the imperative of not leaving anyone behind.
PLA's medical services were set up immediately as part of partisan detachments in 1941. They followed the same decentralised model, organised into an elaborate territorial network of central hospitals with many dispersed smaller wards, as well as mobile teams that followed the troops. Hospitals were set up both in occupied and liberated territories, and while initially lacking in medical personnel, facilities and equipment, as the PLA grew and the liberated territories expanded, medical services developed in capacity and experience. Equipment and medicines (including vaccines) were sourced by raids of enemy troops and hospitals, as well as contraband from the cities.
Medical services were organised by experienced medical staff, consisting largely of women and minorities fleeing the Nazi occupiers and the quislings. However, they depended also on the support of the local population. For instance, Partisan hospital no. 7 on Mt. Javornica, above the village of Vukelić was built by local carpenters, whereas food supplies and cleaning work was provided by local women organised through the committees of the Antifascist Front of Women.
This complex and, by war’s end, a well-organised system of overall 573 hospitals managed not only to provide care for the wounded but also coordinate the prevention of epidemics, the manufacture of medical supplies, and the training of medical staff, thereby laying the foundation for a rapid expansion of public healthcare in the immediate post-war years of socialism.
Note based on the research of Djordje Dragić and Sanja Horvatinčić.