Battle of Kačanik begins

The British chronology of the war records under 5 November 1915 the beginning of the Battle of Kačanik, a small town in the south of Kosovo. The same day the Bulgarians entered Niš, and the Serbian army was falling back from the Morava valley into the mountains, towards the Field of Kosovo. From the south only one good road led into this basin, through the Kačanik gorge. Whoever held it would decide whether the Serbs could still join up with their allies on the Vardar, or whether they would be trapped in Kosovo.

The gorge of the Lepenac river cuts through the mountains between the Šar Mountains and the Skopska Crna Gora range. Through it run the road and the railway from Skopje via Uroševac to Pristina and Mitrovica. Ever since General Georgi Todorov’s Bulgarian Second Army took Skopje on 22 October, the Bulgarians had stood at the southern entrance to the gorge. According to Serbian studies, on 26 October, supported by rebel Albanians, they pushed deep into the defile. They were opposed by weak Serbian forces from Macedonia, the Bregalnica and Vardar Divisions, largely made up of recruits and the oldest reserve classes.

For Vojvoda Radomir Putnik Kačanik was the gateway to the allies. General Maurice Sarrail’s French were fighting in the Vardar valley at Krivolak, a few dozen kilometres south-east of Skopje. At the end of October the Serbian command asked Sarrail to strike through Veles towards Skopje, intending itself to come out to meet him from Kosovo. For this purpose Putnik sent the first-levy Morava Division to Pristina. After the loss of Kragujevac, and with the main forces falling back southwards, the road through the Field of Kosovo and Kačanik was becoming the Serbs’ only hope.

The Bulgarians had the opposite aim. On 1 November the Bulgarian command placed two more divisions under Todorov and ordered him to advance on Pristina while at the same time covering Macedonia against the French. The northern group of the Second Army faced north, towards the Field of Kosovo. According to the Austrian official history, at the beginning of November it had one brigade each of the 3rd and 5th Divisions at Kačanik and at Gnjilane, and its task was to prevent the Serbs from breaking through to Sarrail’s army. On 6 November the group was ordered to make a concentric advance on the Field of Kosovo, through Gnjilane and through Kačanik towards Uroševac and Pristina. The Bulgarians wanted to get there ahead of the Serbs falling back from the north and trap them in the basin before they could regroup.

The date in the British chronology thus precedes by a day the order for the Bulgarian advance given by the Austrian official history. Heavy fighting flared up in the following days. The Serbian divisions, though weak and exhausted, had no intention of giving up the gorge without a fight.