Battle of Kolubara

The Battle of Kolubara was the largest engagement on the Balkan front in 1914 and one of the most unexpected victories of the first year of the war. In November the forces of Austria-Hungary, entering Serbia for the third time, pushed the exhausted Serbian army deep into the country and on 2 December occupied the abandoned city of Belgrade. While Vienna was celebrating an imminent victory, the Serbs, at last supplied with ammunition, went over to the counter-offensive. In less than two weeks they routed the armies of General Oskar Potiorek and drove them out of the whole country.

Name and dates

The battle took its name from the Kolubara, a tributary of the Sava, on which the Serbs halted after their retreat from the Drina. The Serbs also call it the Battle of Suvobor, after the Suvobor range, where the victorious counter-offensive began.

On this page we adopt the dates 16 November – 15 December 1914, given by the Polish, Serbian, German and English Wikipedias. On 16 November the Austro-Hungarian forces reached the Kolubara, and on 15 December the Serbs returned to Belgrade. Some studies, however, count the whole of Potiorek’s third offensive, from 6 November, when the attack from the Drina began. There are also discrepancies over the start of the Serbian counter-offensive. The English Wikipedia dates it to 2 December, but Serbian and German sources, as well as the Polish Wikipedia, agree on 3 December, when the Serbian First Army went over to the attack in the morning.

Background

After the defeat on Mount Cer in August and the indecisive Battle of the Drina in September, General Potiorek, governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina and commander of the Austro-Hungarian forces in the Balkans, was determined to defeat Serbia before winter set in. He had two armies at his disposal: the Fifth Army of General Liborius von Frank and the Sixth Army, which he commanded himself. His superiority over the Serbs lay above all in artillery and ammunition.

Serbia was at the end of its strength. After the Balkan Wars and three months of fighting its army was bled white, poorly clothed and almost without artillery shells. On the night of 30–31 October the Serbian Second Army left its trenches in Mačva, and on 6 November, after a heavy artillery preparation, the main attack of both of Potiorek’s armies began. The Serbs were unable to hold the mountains above the Drina for which they had been fighting since September. The chief of staff of the Serbian army, Vojvoda Radomir Putnik, ordered a retreat into the interior. The army marched along sodden roads, in rain and snow, destroying bridges behind it, and behind it fled the population, who remembered the crimes committed by Austro-Hungarian soldiers in August.

On 15 November the Austro-Hungarians took Valjevo, which was greeted with enthusiasm in Vienna. The Serbian army fell back to previously prepared positions behind the Kolubara and its tributary the Ljig, and in the Maljen and Suvobor mountains. In those same days, in mid-November, the commander of the Serbian First Army, General Petar Bojović, was wounded. His place was taken by General Živojin Mišić, until then Putnik’s deputy in the supreme command, who incidentally came from near Suvobor.

Defence on the Kolubara

On 16 November the Austro-Hungarian forces reached the Kolubara and the next day attacked the Serbian positions. The river, normally small, had burst its banks after downpours and turned the valley into a swamp in which guns and baggage trains got stuck. By 18 November the Austro-Hungarians had taken Lazarevac, and in the following days they fought bitterly for the hills of Vrače Brdo and Čovka, defended by the Second Army of Vojvoda Stepa Stepanović. On 20 November Dimitrije Tucović, leader of the Serbian Social Democrats, was killed there as a platoon commander.

The situation of the First Army on the southern flank was the most difficult. From 20 November two corps of the Sixth Army attacked it. Mišić had to give up the first ridges and on the night of 21–22 November withdrew to Suvobor, and on 24 November the Austro-Hungarians broke the detachment defending Maljen. On 25 November Vrače Brdo and Čovka fell. Soldiers of both sides fought in flooded trenches, in frost and snow, and thousands of them ended up in hospital with frostbite. The Serbian divisions were melting away and their morale was falling.

Mišić’s decision and the loss of Belgrade

On 28 November the Austro-Hungarians broke through the centre of the First Army’s front and reached the crest of Suvobor. Mišić concluded that further defence threatened the destruction of the army. Against the fears of the supreme command he decided to fall back some fifteen kilometres, to positions west of Gornji Milanovac, let his soldiers rest and only then counter-attack. The withdrawal, covered by thick fog, began on 29 November. The supreme command accepted his plan and shortened the whole front. The price was giving up the capital: during the night of 29–30 November and on 30 November the units defending Belgrade left the city and withdrew to the south.

On 2 December, the 66th anniversary of the accession of Emperor Franz Joseph I, Potiorek reported to him by telegram the capture of the city and fortress of Belgrade. There were celebrations in Vienna and Budapest, and Potiorek was convinced that Serbia was beaten. In reality his troops were at the end of their strength. Supply lines stretched for dozens of kilometres along sodden mountain roads, food, warm clothing and ammunition were lacking, and the hospitals were filling with the sick and the frostbitten. On 30 November the Austro-Hungarian command halted the advance to regroup its forces: the Fifth Army was to enter Belgrade and strike the Serbs from the north from there, and the Sixth Army was to extend its front to fill the gap.

Ammunition

All through the autumn the Serbian guns had been short of shells. The government of Prime Minister Nikola Pašić begged the allies for help. In mid-November the situation began to improve. The arsenal at Kragujevac, thanks to ingenious conversions, supplied about 20,000 shells to the front. Around 20 November a large shipment of ammunition from France reached Salonika, and it was carried to Serbia on special trains. When the first crates were opened, it turned out that the French shells, intended for the French or Greek army, were a few millimetres too long and did not fit the Serbian guns of the same calibre. The cases were hastily shortened in the railway workshops at Niš and in the arsenal at Kragujevac, which was just about to be evacuated. By 1 December more than 20,000 shells had been converted in this way. Ammunition was also sent by Greece and by Russia, whose shipment came down the Danube to the port of Prahovo.

According to research by the Serbian historian Danilo Šarenac, when the counter-offensive began the Serbian artillery could count on about 20,000 converted French shells, 20,000 Greek, more than 20,000 Russian and 20,000 home-made ones. At the same time the divisions were brought up to strength with recruits. Even about 1,300 young volunteers, many of them students, trained at the NCO school in Skopje and made corporals ahead of time, were sent to the front. In Serbian history they became a legend as the “1,300 corporals”. Three days without fighting let the soldiers rest, and their morale improved markedly.

The counter-offensive

At dawn on 3 December, after a heavy artillery preparation, Mišić’s First Army struck the Austro-Hungarian Sixth Army, and during the day the other Serbian armies went over to the attack. The attack took the enemy completely by surprise; he was himself preparing for a further offensive, and his heavy artillery had been left far behind. The Austro-Hungarian XVI Corps suffered most. On 5 December units of the First Army retook the crest of Suvobor, the key to the enemy’s whole defence. For this success Mišić received the highest military rank, that of vojvoda.

On 6 December Potiorek ordered the Sixth Army to retreat behind the Kolubara, and two days later further west. The retreat quickly turned into flight. The Austro-Hungarians abandoned guns, baggage trains and wounded, and thousands of soldiers were taken prisoner. On 7–8 December the Serbs recovered Valjevo, and soon afterwards also Užice. The remnants of the Sixth Army withdrew across the Drina into Bosnia.

The Fifth Army held out longer around Belgrade, where it still tried to counter-attack. The capital’s defence units and Stepanović’s Second Army, however, pushed it back towards the city. On 13 December General Frank reported that he could guarantee neither holding Belgrade nor a safe retreat, and the next day the decision was taken to abandon the city. During the night of 14–15 December, under cover of darkness and of river monitors, the last Austro-Hungarian units crossed the Sava, and on 15 December the Serbs entered the capital. Serbia had been cleared of the invader’s troops.

Losses

Both sides suffered enormous losses, and the figures given vary according to the source and whether they cover the battle alone or the whole third offensive. According to the most often cited figures the Serbian army lost about 22,000 killed, about 91,000–92,000 wounded and about 19,000 taken prisoner and missing. Austro-Hungarian losses are estimated at about 28,000 killed, about 120,000 wounded and sick and 70,000–76,000 taken prisoner and missing. The Serbs captured about 130 guns, 70 machine guns and huge quantities of equipment.

Significance

Kolubara was one of the greatest Allied victories of 1914, compared by the Serbs to the Battle of the Marne. A small, exhausted army had routed a more numerous and better-armed enemy and finally wrecked Austro-Hungarian plans for a quick defeat of Serbia. For the Habsburg monarchy, which had only just celebrated the capture of Belgrade, it was a humiliation. The defeat weakened its prestige in the Balkans and set back its hopes of drawing Bulgaria to the Central Powers, as well as of keeping Romania neutral.

At the end of December Potiorek and Frank lost their commands, and the two armies were merged into a single Fifth Army. Calm settled over the Serbian front and lasted until the autumn of 1915. The victory, however, was bought at an enormous cost. The exhausted country, full of wounded, refugees and prisoners, fell victim in the winter to an epidemic of typhus, which claimed tens of thousands of lives. The Western press also reported widely on the crimes committed by Austro-Hungarian troops against the Serbian civilian population during the invasion.