Battle of the Vardar ends

On 22 May 1917 General George Milne called off an attack on the Bulgarian positions near the villages of Spatovo and Ernekioi in the Struma valley. Preparations for it had been under way since 20 May, but the attack no longer made sense. The spring offensive of General Maurice Sarrail, which all British operations in Macedonia were merely meant to support, had just ended. The British chronology of the war gives this day as the end of the battle of the Vardar. According to the British official history and the Italian historian Luigi Villari, Sarrail himself had ordered the attacks to stop a day earlier, on 21 May. Villari adds that the order reached the Serbs only on 23 May, and this date for the end of the operation is also given by the Soviet historian Nikolai Korsun.

The last attacks

The offensive had already collapsed on the first day of the infantry assault, 9 May. In the Crna bend the French, Italians and Russians took several trenches, but by evening had lost them all. Renewed attacks on 11 May achieved nothing. On 15 May the French minister of war, Paul Painlevé, left it to Sarrail to decide whether to break off the offensive, which was not to be pursued at the cost of casualties out of proportion to the objective. Sarrail wanted to try once more. On 17 May, after four days of bombardment, the 42nd Regiment of the 11th Colonial Division reached the enemy’s second line on the Piton Rocheux hill, but, cut off by barrage fire and counter-attacked by the Germans, it barely managed to withdraw, losing 413 men. A simultaneous attack north of Bitola cost more than 700 men and also failed.

The last hope was the Serbs. From the outset Sarrail had intended them to deliver the main blow, but on 9 May their Second Army took only Hill 1824 in the mountains above the Meglena basin and halted. After one more small attack the Serbian command demanded that the offensive be broken off. According to the British official history, this was the first time in the war that the Serbs had refused to continue an attack. The regent Alexander and the chief of staff, General Petar Bojović, concluded that the army had not yet recovered from the exertions of 1916 and that another failed offensive might break it. The Serbian First Army, standing right next to the bend, did not go into action at all.

Outcome

The whole offensive, including the two British attacks at Lake Doiran, cost the Allies about 14,000 men according to the British official history. All that was gained was the first line of Bulgarian trenches on a narrow sector at Doiran, Hill 1824 and a few unimportant advanced positions. Prisoners were few, and the enemy’s losses were certainly much smaller. Milne reported to London that the failure was due above all to the strengthening of the enemy artillery and to the French failure to gain fire superiority, in which they were also hampered by the weather. He added that there was mistrust among the Allies and that each was “looking over his shoulder at the other”.

The British official history sees deeper causes. The plan was sound in its broad outlines, but it was carried out piecemeal, without concentration of forces. The French commander in the bend, General Lebouc, had presented Sarrail with his own plan: to bring four French divisions, the Italians, both Russian brigades, the Serbian First Army and perhaps one or two British divisions under a single command, break through the front in the bend and throw the Serbs into the breach. The British liaison officer believed that, since part of a Russian regiment without reserves had broken through on 9 May as far as the village of Orle behind the enemy lines, such a plan could have succeeded. Sarrail, meanwhile, kept two divisions in reserve throughout the battle in case of trouble with Greece. He himself blamed the Serbs and the intrigues of Lebouc, who in his view wanted to put the regent Alexander at the head of the troops and become his chief of staff. Villari believes there was some truth in this, but that the main cause was the lack of confidence in Sarrail. It was shared by the Serbs, the British, the Italians and the French generals.

What came next

For the Bulgarians the defence was a victory. Villari writes that their morale, which had been flagging since the autumn defeat at Bitola, rose again, and with it the will to fight to the end. The British wrote off Macedonia as a lost cause. The 60th Division was to sail for Egypt at once, and on 26 May Milne ordered preparations for a withdrawal from the malarial Struma valley to a summer line in the hills. Sarrail turned south, against King Constantine I. In June the Allied forces occupied Thessaly and the king abdicated. Confidence in Sarrail did not return. In December 1917 the new French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, recalled him from Salonika.