Battle of the Crna begins

The British chronology of the war records under 5 October 1916 the start of the battle of the Crna and Monastir, that is, Bitola. According to Bulgarian accounts, on that day Serbian units first tried to cross the Crna in its mountain bend east of the city. A few managed to reach the far bank, but a Bulgarian counter-attack pushed them back, and some of the Serbs were taken prisoner. The sources do not fully agree about the first days of the battle. The British official history of the operations in Macedonia does not mention fighting on 5 October and dates the first successful Serbian crossing of the river to the night of 7–8 October. The British journalist Gordon Gordon-Smith, who accompanied the Serbian army, wrote that the Serbian Third Army reached the river on 4 October and crossed it at Skočivir on 9 October.

The battle was a continuation of the autumn offensive of General Maurice Sarrail, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces in Macedonia. In September the Serbs, French and Russians had thrown back the Bulgarians, who in August had taken Florina, and on 30 September the Serbian Drina Division captured the peak of Kaymakchalan, which dominated the whole area. From the summit the Serbs could already look down on the bend of the Crna and on the land they had lost in the autumn of 1915. On the night of 2–3 October the Bulgarians fell back to a previously prepared line of defence. It ran from Lake Prespa through the villages on the plain south of Bitola, including Kenali, and then along the bend of the river. Gordon-Smith described how the Serbs, following close on the heels of the retreating enemy, crossed the Greek border and stood once more on Serbian soil. The British official history notes that this gave them fresh determination.

On the plain before Bitola stood French troops and a Russian brigade under General Victor Cordonnier. According to the British official history, on 5 October Cordonnier personally inspected the Bulgarian positions at Kenali from an aircraft. He concluded that on open ground, with the artillery he had, he could not take them by frontal attack, and proposed an outflanking move through the mountains to the west combined with Serbian pressure in the east. Sarrail, however, ordered him to attack at once to relieve the Serbs. The Commander-in-Chief of the French army, General Joseph Joffre, was in turn pressing Sarrail, because Romania, which had entered the war in August, was losing in the Dobruja and Transylvania and needed relief.

On the other side the situation was difficult. The Bulgarian units, especially the 8th Tundzha Infantry Division, which now bore the main weight of the fighting, were exhausted after the September defeats. At the end of September the front at Bitola had been taken over by the headquarters of General Arnold von Winckler’s German 11th Army, but there were still few German soldiers here, mainly artillery and machine guns. The British official history writes that, according to the German monograph on the battle, the Bulgarian front would have broken in mid-October had it not been for the help sent from Germany.

The next day, 6 October, the Serbs attacked again near the villages of Dobroveni and Skočivir and were again repulsed, and on the plain a Franco-Russian attack broke down. The battle dragged on for more than two months. The Serbs took the hills in the bend one by one, while the Germans brought more and more battalions to Bitola. On 19 November the Allies entered the city, abandoned by the Serbs almost a year earlier, but on the hills just beyond it the enemy held the front.