Battle of Doiran begins

On 18 September 1918 at 5.08 a.m. British and Greek troops went into the assault on the Bulgarian positions west of Lake Doiran. Three days earlier the Serbs and French had broken the front at Dobro Pole, and the Allied commander-in-chief on the Salonika front, General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, now wanted General George Milne’s British Salonika Army to pin down the Bulgarian 1st Army and prevent it from sending reinforcements to the threatened sector. The British chronology of the war records for this day the beginning of “the Battle of Monastir–Doiran”, that is, the British and French part in the offensive, which was to last until 24 September, and within it the Battle of Doiran.

The forward line by the lake

The Bulgarian 9th Pleven Division of General Vladimir Vazov was defending the same hills on which, in the spring of 1917, the British 26th Division had bled itself white. For two days the British artillery had been destroying the wire, and at night it shelled the Bulgarian batteries with gas shells. When the infantry advanced, red rockets went up over the Bulgarian trenches and the defenders immediately laid down a barrage prepared in advance. On the right wing, by the lake itself, the Greek Serres Division attacked. The Greeks, for whom, as the British official history observes, these hills held no grim memories, went forward with great enthusiasm. At about 6 a.m. they took the Doiran and Teton hills, and an hour later the heavily fortified Hill 340. One regiment even broke onto the Orb, a hill belonging to the main defensive line below the summit of the Grand Couronné, but Bulgarian counter-attacks forced it to withdraw. By the afternoon the Greeks held the whole forward position firmly.

Slaughter on P Ridge

To their left the British 22nd Division, with the Greek 3rd Regiment, attacked deep into the system of fortifications, through deep ravines and narrow gaps in the wire. Several units reached their objectives, but everywhere they were driven back. A battalion of the South Wales Borderers pushed through a cloud of smoke right up to the summit of the Grand Couronné and was wiped out there by fire from three sides. Its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Burges, wounded three times, was later awarded the Victoria Cross. It was worst on the narrow P Ridge, where the 66th Brigade could attack with only one battalion at a time. The Cheshire battalion was held up at the first Bulgarian work and lost the cover of the barrage. According to the British official history the battalion “simply disappeared”, and its commander was killed. The next battalion, the South Lancashires, lost almost two-thirds of its men. With counter-attacks that began at about 10 a.m., the Bulgarians had by early afternoon recovered everything the 22nd Division had taken here, except for one work on the right flank.

North of the lake that same morning the Greek Crete Division attacked the Blaga range, a spur of Belasica. It had to cross a flat plain under Bulgarian artillery fire, and communication with the British batteries hardly worked. Two attacks ended in failure. Before the second, Bulgarian shells set the dry grass alight and the fire drove back one of the Greek regiments. After 4 p.m. the Cretans withdrew, having lost nearly 800 men.

Evening

Nearly 800 Bulgarians were taken prisoner that day, almost all of them by the Serres Division. The attackers’ losses, however, were enormous: three battalions of the 67th Brigade had practically ceased to exist, and from one of them only 56 men came out of the fighting. The Bulgarian commander of the 1st Army, General Stefan Nerezov, who had gone up to the front line in the morning, considered the attack shattered and even proposed to the command a counter-offensive towards Salonika. The Germans, who commanded the army group in Macedonia, considered this too risky. On the other side Milne, urged by Franchet d’Espèrey to exploit the Serbian success at all costs, had no intention of giving way. At 5 p.m., on his instructions, the commander of XII Corps, General Wilson, issued an order to renew the attack the next morning.