The Battle of the Vardar is the name under which the British chronology of the war recorded the main part of General Maurice Sarrail’s spring offensive in Macedonia. The Allied commander-in-chief in the Balkans wanted to break the Bulgarian-German front west of the Vardar: the French, Italians and Russians were to strike in the bend of the Crna, the Serbs in the mountains east of the bend, and subsidiary attacks were to pin the enemy down at Bitola and on the Vardar itself. The bombardment began on 5 May and the infantry went in on 9 May. After the first day it was clear that the offensive had failed. Further attacks on 11 and 17 May changed nothing, the Serbs demanded that the fighting be stopped, and on 21 May Sarrail gave that order.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of the Vardar” is misleading. The British chronology of the war, compiled in 1922 by the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence, gives “beginning of the Battle of the Vardar” under 5 May 1917 and its end under 22 May. The heaviest fighting, however, took place not on the Vardar but several dozen kilometres further west, in the Crna bend and in the mountains above the Moglena (PL) basin. The British official history of the operations in Macedonia (Falls) speaks simply of the “offensive west of the Vardar”. In Bulgaria the fighting in the bend is called the May battle in the Crna bend, and Petar Doshkinov’s 1935 monograph dates it from 5 to 9 May. The British attack at Lake Doiran, although it was part of the same offensive, was treated by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee as a separate battle.

We take 5 May as the start. On that day the French and Italian artillery opened fire on the positions in the bend, and during the night the French 122nd Division, with Greek troops, pushed the line forward on the right bank of the Vardar. The end is less obvious. Falls and the Italian historian Luigi Villari state that Sarrail ordered the attacks to be stopped on 21 May. According to Villari, the order then applied to the French and British, and to the Serbs only on 23 May. The Soviet historian Nikolai Korsun also dates the halting of the operation to 23 May. General George Milne called off the last British preparations on the Struma on 22 May. We follow the date in the chronology.

Background

The plan for the spring offensive was drawn up in the winter. Sarrail wanted the Serbs to deliver the main blow, while the British at Doiran and the French and Italians in the Crna bend pinned the enemy down. The commander of the French Armée d’Orient, General Paul Grossetti, warned that preparations would take at least 40 days, so the date was set for 12 April. It was then postponed several times. April in the mountains was dreadful: blizzards, landslides and avalanches destroyed the roads. The British attacked at Doiran as planned on 24 April, but the rest of the Allies were not ready, and Milne learned of this only after the attack. In March the French had retaken some of the hills around Bitola, but the town was still under fire.

The political situation was unfavourable. In April at the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne conference, and in early May in Paris, the British announced that they would withdraw some of their troops from Macedonia. Sarrail did not trust King Constantine I and throughout the battle kept the equivalent of two divisions in reserve in case the Greek army made moves in his rear. Villari writes that Sarrail was already thinking of sending three divisions to Thessaly to seize the harvest there. The Allied forces were a patchwork. The British were constrained by their government, the Italians looked above all to Albania and the Adriatic coast, the Russian brigades were losing cohesion after the February Revolution, the Serbs were exhausted after the fighting of 1916, and the army of Eleftherios Venizelos’s Greek government was only just being formed. Falls stresses that nobody trusted Sarrail or his chief of staff, General Michaud. The French generals did not believe in the plan either.

Forces

According to Falls, the enemy had about 255 battalions on the whole Macedonian front, including the British sector, about 220 of them Bulgarian, against 274 Allied battalions. The Allies had superiority in field and mountain artillery (more than five to four), but only a slight one in heavy artillery. From the end of April the army group comprising General Arnold von Winckler’s German 11th Army and General Dimitar Geshov’s Bulgarian 1st Army was commanded by General Friedrich von Scholtz. Despite its name, the 11th Army consisted mostly of Bulgarian divisions with an admixture of German regiments.

From the Vardar to the village of Nonte on the slopes of the Kožuf range stood the French 122nd Division, a regiment of the 30th Division and a Greek division of Venizelos’s army, all under the command of General Gérôme. Falls calls it the Serres Division, while Villari writes of two regiments of the Archipelago Division. Further on, as far as the Crna, the front was held by the Serbian 2nd and 1st Armies of Regent Alexander and his chief of staff, General Petar Bojović, with General Leontiev’s Russian brigade attached. In the Crna bend stood General Lebouc’s group: the French 17th and 16th Colonial Divisions, General Mikhail Diterikhs’s Russian 2nd Special Brigade and General Giuseppe Pennella’s Italian 35th Division, with the 11th Colonial Division in reserve. Further west, around Bitola, stood the French 57th and 156th Divisions, and between the lakes the 76th Division.

The Crna bend was one of the most strongly defended places on the front. According to Doshkinov, it was held by the German 302nd Division with one German and two Bulgarian brigades and the German-Bulgarian 22nd Brigade: 40 battalions, 122 guns and 246 machine guns in all. The Allies had 69 battalions and 412 guns here. The key point of the defence was hill 1050, which the Germans and Bulgarians had held since the autumn of 1916. The trenches were covered by belts of barbed wire several metres deep, and in places more than ten, and some of the dugouts had been hewn in the rock. The defenders knew that an attack was coming and decided to keep as many men as possible in the front line and to hold strong reserves ready for counter-attacks.

Course

Bombardment (5–8 May)

On 5 May 91 French and Italian batteries opened fire along the whole length of the positions in the bend. In warm, windless weather the defenders’ line vanished in a cloud of smoke and dust. According to Doshkinov, the bombardment hit hardest the Bulgarian brigade on the flat ground, where there were not enough dugouts for everyone, and barely harmed the Germans on hills 1020 and 1050. In the afternoon the fire had to be stopped for a while, because German fighters appeared over the front and shot down a French observation balloon. At night the bombardment slackened and the defenders repaired the wire. On the night of 5 May the French 122nd Division and the Greek division pushed their line forward on a sector almost five kilometres long, in places by more than 800 metres. They took mainly forward outposts.

The bombardment lasted until 8 May. Allied patrols checked the effects of the fire and were driven off, while the German and Bulgarian artillery, directed from aircraft, replied ever more strongly. Grossetti judged the results of the first three days insufficient and extended the bombardment by another day. The long preparation, however, gave away where the main blow would fall. According to Doshkinov, the Bulgarian infantry lost 945 men in those days, and the artillery only ten.

The attack in the bend (9 May)

On 9 May at 6.30 a.m. the infantry went forward on a front about 11 kilometres long. The Italian 35th Division attacked hills 1020 and 1050 and a ridge called the Piton Brûlé. In places the Italians broke into the first and second lines, but fire from the front and flanks and counter-attacks by German riflemen threw them back. One company was almost wiped out by the explosion of a mine laid in a captured trench. A second attack at 9.45 a.m. also failed, and at noon Pennella called it off. According to various sources, the Italians lost 2,400–2,700 men that day.

The French 16th Colonial Division briefly took the hill the French called the Mamelon des Tranchées Rouges and part of the Piton Rocheux, but was driven out of both in hand-to-hand fighting. The loss of the Piton Rocheux exposed the Italians’ right wing. The 17th Colonial Division stormed the position the defenders called “Caesar” three times and was repulsed three times. The greatest success was achieved by the Russian brigade. Its 4th Regiment took the Dabica hill by 8 a.m. and captured about 80 Germans, and according to Falls one battalion broke through as far as the village of Orle behind the second line of defence. Because the French had not taken “Caesar”, the Germans and Bulgarians were able to concentrate on the Russians. In the evening a counter-attack from two sides retook Dabica. By nightfall all units had returned to their starting positions.

The Serbs and further attempts (9–17 May)

On the same day the Serbian 2nd Army took hill 1824 in the Moglena mountains, south of the Dobro Pole peak. According to Villari, the losses were small. On 11 May one of the Serbian divisions advanced a little further. There the Serbian attack came to a halt. The Serbian command proposed to Sarrail that its armies should wait in reserve and join the battle only once the French had broken through the front in the bend. Sarrail could not agree to this, because the whole plan was built precisely on a Serbian blow.

In the bend the attack was to be renewed on the left wing on 10 May, but at 7.30 a.m. it was called off. The message did not reach one French and one Italian battalion in time. Both attacked alone and suffered heavy losses. On 11 May the French and Italians attacked as planned and were again repulsed. On 15 May the war minister, Paul Painlevé, telegraphed Sarrail that in view of the general situation, especially in Greece, the offensive should not be pursued at the cost of casualties out of proportion to its aim, and left it to him to decide whether to break it off. Sarrail replied that he would try “to take piecemeal what could not be taken at once”, and that if there was no breakthrough he would halt the offensive along the whole front.

The last attack in the bend went in on 17 May after four days of bombardment. The 42nd Regiment of the 11th Colonial Division reached the second line on the Piton Rocheux, but a barrage cut it off from support, it ran out of grenades, and German counter-attacks forced the soldiers to fight their way back. The regiment lost 413 men. A simultaneous attack north of Bitola cost more than 700 men and also achieved nothing. On the Struma the British XVI Corps on 15 May took the village of Kjupri and the forward trenches in front of Ernekioi, capturing 89 prisoners, and beat off several counter-attacks.

The end

The Serbs made one more small attack and then demanded that the offensive be stopped. On 21 May Sarrail issued the order to halt the attacks. On 22 May Milne called off the prepared attack on Spatovo and Ernekioi on the Struma. The Serbian 1st Army, standing just east of the bend, did not go into action even once.

Losses

Falls puts the losses of the whole spring offensive, including the British at Doiran, at about 14,000 men. Villari gives 13,000–14,000, and Korsun about 20,000 (11,000 French, 6,100 British and 900 Serbs). In the Crna bend the attack of 9 May alone cost the Italians 2,400–2,700 men, the French 16th Colonial Division 1,053, and the 17th Division 526 according to Falls, about 700 according to Doshkinov. The Russians lost 975–1,325 killed and wounded. Villari estimates Italian losses up to 11 May at about 3,000 and those of the Serbs at about 1,000. According to Doshkinov, the Bulgarians lost 1,626 men in the bend from 5 to 9 May. German losses are not known, but Falls believes they must have been considerable in the bend. The Allies took few prisoners, and the enemy’s losses were certainly much smaller than their own.

Significance

The offensive brought the Allies nothing but a few forward trenches and hill 1824. Falls sees the main cause of the defeat in a lack of faith in the plan, which the French generals shared too. The attacks were made piecemeal, without coordination or concentration of forces, and the artillery failed to destroy the positions or silence the enemy batteries. Sarrail blamed the Serbs, who for the first time in this war refused to continue an attack. Falls explains this by the fear of Regent Alexander and Bojović that another defeat would break an army in which many soldiers had been under arms for five years. They were also worried by Austrian propaganda in the ranks and by the influence of the Russian brigade, which the revolution was beginning to corrupt. The Serbian command was also preoccupied with an internal crisis: officers of the secret organisation Black Hand were then removed from their commands, and its leader, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević “Apis”, was being tried in Salonika.

The Bulgarians and Germans regarded the defence as a victory. Villari notes that their morale, which had been flagging since the autumn defeat at Bitola in 1916, rose again. For the Allies it was the reverse. The British government concluded that nothing more could be achieved in the Balkans and in the summer began withdrawing divisions to Egypt and Palestine. A great offensive in Macedonia came only in September 1918. Sarrail meanwhile turned south, against King Constantine. Confidence in him had, however, been undermined, and at the end of 1917 he lost his post.

Battle of the Vardar (1917)