THE BATTLE OF VUKOVAR: Don’t Cry My Gracious Angel Kindle Edition

In the summer of 1991, during the break-up of the former state of Yugoslavia, the Republic of Serbia (one of the 6 republics in the former state of Yugoslavia) attacked the Republic of Croatia with the federal army (Yugoslav People's Army) and Serbian volunteer units in the aim to occupy as large a territory of the Republic of Croatia as possible. The key battles were led around the taking of Croatian towns situated nearest to the Republic of Serbia, around the town of Vukovar in the north, and the town of Dubrovnik in the south east of Croatia. The Republic of Serbia sent around 50,000 soldiers, several hundred tanks and armoured personnel carriers, dozens of aircraft and helicopters, several ships and thousands of missile and artillery weapons into the battle to conquer Vukovar. The Croatian forces defending Vukovar had at their disposal just 1,803 soldiers who had only hand-held weapons and about twenty cannons of various calibres. The Serbian army did not succeed in occupying Vukovar in only a few days as it was planned, so they started a campaign of mass shelling of the whole town not respecting the Geneva Convention according to which shelling of hospitals and civilian facilities (houses) is forbidden. Each day an average of 5,000 shells fell killing and wounding several thousand civilians and defenders and the town was completely destroyed. Once the Croatian defenders of Vukovar remained without ammunition, and after a full 88 days under siege of the town, some of them attempted a breach and all of those who remained in the town were captured. Contrary to the agreed surrender conditions, the Serbian occupiers looted the town, raped women, killed Croats and left their corpses lying along the roads, and then took out all the wounded and civilians from the Vukovar hospital and after frightful torture, killed them all and threw them in the mass grave ''Ovčara''. They transferred the surviving defenders and civilians of Vukovar to the Republic of Serbia, where they formed concentration camps in which they tortured, beat up and raped Croatian soldiers and civilians. During the battle for Vukovar, and after its occupation, the Serbs killed 2,717 defenders and civilians (elderly men, women, and children), and we are still searching for 300 mortal remains of Croatians killed after the occupation of Vukovar. The book describes the arrival of the young student Damir Plavšić (21) from Zagreb, where he studied veterinary medicine, in Vukovar and his joining in the town's defence. Damir describes the battles on Vukovar's hardest defence line – ''Sajmište'', then on ''Priljevo'' and in the end in ''Borovo Naselje''. After the fall of Vukovar on 20 November 1991, Damir Plavšić describes the capture followed by beatings and torture in Serbian concentration camps ''Stajićevo'', ''Niš'' and ''Sremska Mitrovica'' in the Republic of Serbia. The book ends with the description of the exchange of war prisoners and the last page of the war diary written by his father Ivan Zvonimir Plavšić. The Serbs dragged his father from the Vukovar hospital, tortured him and in the end killed him and threw him in the mass grave ''Ovčara'' together with the Vukovar journalist Siniša Glavašević, the French volunteer Jean-Michel Nicolier and 262 wounded and civilians from the Vukovar hospital who were killed and buried in the same mass grave. Read more