When
WW2 ended in Europe on 17th of November, 1944, Czechoslovakia ended up divided between the Allies who occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and the Soviets who "liberated" Slovakia from the Germans and their puppet regime that had been in place since 1939. Given the frosty relations between the West and the East that resulted from the Western refusal to give the Soviets their own occupation zone in East Germany, re-unification of the country was a distant prospect. Stalin certainly didn't waste time when he set up the
Slovak Socialist Republic, a regime neither the West nor the Czechoslovak government in Prague recognized.
The relations grew steadily worse when anti-communist partisans began operating in the mountainous regions of central and western Slovakia, clearly receiving recruits and logistical support from Czechia. In turn, the Soviets secretly incited the Czechoslovak Communist Party to stage a coup following the 1946 elections in Bohemia and Moravia. The coup failed and as a result the Communists were outlawed and forced into hiding or exile, while the Czech military was purged of Communist sympathizers. Czechoslovak government was then reorganized, and the country started calling itself the Czech Federal Republic - however, it still didn't recognize the Slovak communist regime nor did it give up its claims to the whole territory of pre-war Czechoslovakia.
At the centre of the dispute laid two small and otherwise unimportant patches of land: the area between the Morava River and the Small Carpathians consisting of four pre-war administrative districts (Malacky, Senica, Skalica, Myjava), and an even smaller area in the north west, centred around the town of Čadca. Despite being ethnically Slovak and having belonged to Slovakia administratively in pre-war Czechoslovakia, the Czechs refused to hand them over to the Slovak regime when the war ended. Later, they began to be used as training bases for the anti-communist partisans operating in Slovakia. For years the Slovak Communists complained to the Soviets and called for a military action to seize these territories; however, Stalin was reluctant to risk a confrontation with the West over such an unimportant issue. Only when all hopes of a communist takeover of Bohemia and Moravia had been lost and the Soviet Union had suffered similar setbacks in Western Poland and the Aegean did Stalin finally give a tacit approval for a limited military operation by the Slovak army against the C.F.R with the aim of reclaiming the lost territories and eliminating the partisan bases. The operation received the codename "Morava".
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For the operation "Morava", the Slovak army deployed most of its newly constituted forces: 1 armoured division equipped with Soviet T-34/85 medium tanks, 3 infantry divisions (2 of them in reserve), and 1 division of mountaineers that had gained a considerable experience in fighting against the partisans in central Slovakia. All Slovak divisions included strong artillery support units, equipped also with the infamous Katyusha rocket launchers. In the air, the Slovak army was supported by a small, but relatively well-equipped and well-trained air force whose purpose was to cover the advancing ground forces and provide ground support when and where necessary.
In the south, the Slovak plan was to overwhelm the weak Czech forces guarding the territory and rapidly advance towards the Morava River, where they would establish solid defence positions and repel any potential Czech counter-attack. Eventually, international pressure would force the C.F.R. to sign an armistice that would give a de facto control over the region to Slovakia. For the plan to succeed, strict secrecy had to be maintained in order to achieve the full element of surprise. For that purpose, the Slovak forces ceased the intermittent artillery attacks and small unit raids near the demarcation line that had characterised the post-war reality in the region and moved to the interior with the feigned goal of quelling the partisans.
The ruse worked as expected when the Czechs recalled some of their military units previously deployed in the disputed territory. The only forces left were an independent regiment of border control troops who were deployed in garrisons in a number of villages close to the demarcation line, and a battalion-sized group of Slovak anti-communist partisans undergoing training. The C.F.R. general staff believed that any concentration of Communist forces near the line would be spotted in time for reinforcements to arrive.
When the divisions assigned for the operation were prepared, the Slovaks started moving them back to the demarcation line in utmost secrecy - troops often moved in company-sized units, without uniforms, and at night, while the heavy equipment was skilfully camouflaged in the staging areas. By the end of March, 1949, the Slovak People's Army was ready to strike against the unsuspecting Czechs.
Situation on March 31st, 1949:
As you can see, the Kurds, the Armenians, and the Greeks - all of whom were subjected to (near) genocidal policies by the Turks in recent history - profited handsomely from this partition.
(except the kurdish state)
