Battle of Doiran begins

At 9.45 p.m. on 24 April 1917 British infantry went in to assault the Bulgarian positions west of Lake Dojran. The attack was the first act of the spring offensive that General Maurice Sarrail had planned along the whole Macedonian front. General George Milne’s British Salonika Army was to pin down the Bulgarians at Dojran two days before the main attack by the French, Serbs, Italians and Russians west of the Vardar. The task was difficult. Colonel Vladimir Vazov’s Bulgarian 9th Pleven Division sat in trenches cut into the rock, on hills from which it could see the whole British rear as far as the horizon. The British artillery had been destroying the wire since 21 April, and Bulgarian sources date the start of the battle from 22 April, when the bombardment intensified.

Milne ordered only the first Bulgarian line to be taken for the time being: the works between the lake and the hill of Petit Couronné, Hill 380, the hill called the Mamelon, and the most advanced work on the ridge the British called “P Ridge” (from the French designation of the summits “Piton 1”, “Piton 2”). The attack was planned for the night, because by day the Bulgarians could see every movement. Two divisions of XII Corps attacked: the 26th by the lake and the 22nd further west. On the morning of 24 April, however, a Bulgarian deserter came over to the British and stated that his battalion was to expect an attack that evening at about 8 p.m. Milne decided not to change the plan. The Bulgarians could in any case see the British laying telephone cables and digging communication trenches.

On the right flank the attack of the 26th Division ended in disaster. The Bulgarian artillery put down a barrage before the infantry reached its jumping-off positions, and hit with extraordinary accuracy the bottom of the Jumeaux Ravine, about 120 metres deep, through which the battalions had to pass. The shells of a German battery of 150 mm naval guns were particularly damaging. The Wiltshire battalion by the lake shore ran into uncut wire and machine-gun fire, and the Hampshire battalion was stuck in the ravine. Only two companies of the Devon battalion took the work on the eastern slope of Petit Couronné. In the darkness the staffs long did not know what was happening, and reinforcements went into the fight a company at a time. At about 4 a.m. the divisional commander called off a renewed attack, and the men still holding on in the Bulgarian trenches withdrew before dawn.

On the left flank the 66th Brigade of the 22nd Division achieved success. Its Shropshire and Manchester battalions deployed beyond the reach of the Bulgarian barrage, crossed the ground in front of the enemy line against little resistance and by 10 p.m. had taken Hill 380, the Mamelon and the advanced work on P Ridge. They dug in not on the captured positions but behind them, which the Bulgarians did not expect. A Bulgarian counter-attack at dawn on 25 April came to a halt on the new British wire, and further attempts over the following days were also repulsed. A raid by the 60th Division on the Vardar achieved nothing, because the Bulgarians had withdrawn to their second line.

The price was high. According to the British official history, in the week ending 29 April XII Corps lost 3,163 killed, wounded and missing, while taking only 22 prisoners. According to their own figures, the Bulgarians lost 835 men on 24–25 April. Under the plan the British were to be merely the prelude to the main offensive, but the French postponed it once again, and Milne learned of this only after the attack. The main attack west of the Vardar did not begin until 9 May, and on the night of 8–9 May the British attacked at Dojran for the second time, with equally poor results.