Defence of Belgrade

The defence of Belgrade in the autumn of 1915 was the first act of the Central Powers’ conquest of Serbia. The Serbian capital lay right on the border, where the Sava flows into the Danube, opposite Zemun, then Austro-Hungarian. From the first hours of the war it had been shelled from the other bank, and in December 1914 it had already once, for less than two weeks, fallen into Austrian hands. This time the handful of its defenders faced the Austro-Hungarian Third Army, reinforced by a German corps and the heaviest artillery. After two days and nights of fierce fighting on the river banks, in which the Serbs several times tried to drive the landing force back into the water, the city fell on 9 October 1915.

Name and dates

Polish works have no established name for this fighting. The Serbs speak of the defence of Belgrade (Odbrana Beograda) or the fall of Belgrade, and the Austrian official history of the capture of Belgrade. This page uses the dates 6–9 October 1915. On the afternoon of 6 October, after a day of ranging, the Central Powers’ artillery began the bombardment proper of the Serbian positions, and in the night of 6–7 October the infantry set off across the rivers. On the morning of 9 October Austro-Hungarian and German troops entered the city, which the British chronology of the war records as the occupation of Belgrade.

Other sources draw these limits differently. Serbian accounts often begin on 5 October, because the first shells fell on the city that day. The Austrian official history describes the capture of Belgrade as the operations of 6–11 October, together with the fighting for the hills south of the city, and some Serbian works count the defence of Belgrade right up to the middle of October, when the capital’s troops withdrew into the interior.

Background

After the defeat on the Kolubara in December 1914, Austria-Hungary was for a long time unable to strike at Serbia again. The situation changed in the summer of 1915. The Russians were retreating in the east, the Entente forces were stuck at Gallipoli, and the Germans needed an overland route to Turkey to supply it with weapons and ammunition. In September Bulgaria joined the Central Powers. Under the military convention signed at Pless, Germany and Austria-Hungary were to attack Serbia from the north, and the Bulgarians a few days later from the east. Command of the whole operation was taken by Field Marshal August von Mackensen, the victor of Gorlice, who in the second half of September set up his headquarters in Temesvár.

Mackensen had two armies. The German Eleventh Army of General Max von Gallwitz was crossing the Danube further east, between Smederevo and Ram, and was to deliver the main blow in the Morava valley. The Austro-Hungarian Third Army of General Hermann Kövess was to take Belgrade and the hills south of it, as far as Mount Avala, and draw as many Serbs as possible onto itself. For the attack on the capital Kövess assigned the Austro-Hungarian VIII Corps of General Viktor von Scheuchenstuel (57th and 59th Infantry Divisions) and the German XXII Reserve Corps of General of Cavalry Eugen von Falkenhayn, the elder brother of the chief of the German General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, with the 43rd and 44th Reserve Divisions and the 26th Infantry Division in reserve. VIII Corps was to cross the Danube and the Sava at the foot of the fortress, the Germans the Sava west of the city, via Great and Little Gypsy Island. Further up the Sava, at Kupinovo, the Austro-Hungarian XIX Corps was crossing; it took no part in the fighting for the city itself.

The Serbs, who knew of the enemy’s concentration, had meanwhile moved a large part of their forces to the Bulgarian border. Belgrade was defended by the capital defence troops of General Mihailo Živković. According to the Austrian official history, based on a Serbian staff study, he had 20 infantry battalions, two cavalry squadrons and 75 guns on a sector about 50 kilometres long. Kövess’s army had 66 battalions and 273 guns before Belgrade itself, 108 of them heavy. The defence was supported by the British naval mission of Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, with eight 4.7-inch naval guns, and by French heavy guns. In the high command’s reserve, a day’s march south of the city, at Sopot, stood the Timok Division of the second levy. Overall command of the Serbian army was held by Vojvoda Radomir Putnik.

Bombardment, 5–6 October

On 5 October the Central Powers’ artillery began ranging on the Serbian positions, and on the afternoon of 6 October it opened fire along the whole line of the Sava and Danube. Guns of every calibre, from mountain guns to German 42 cm mortars, pounded the walls of the Kalemegdan fortress, the fortifications on the banks and the city itself. According to some Serbian sources about 30,000 shells fell on the city in a single day. The suburbs were reduced to rubble, and fires broke out in Belgrade that at night lit up the waters of both rivers. Even so, the Serbian infantry did not leave its trenches. Major Dragutin Gavrilović, commander of a battalion of the 10th Infantry Regiment defending the Danube embankment below the fortress, according to Serbian accounts ordered the trenches on the boulevard abandoned and new ones dug right by the water, because the German artillery was shelling the ground only some tens of metres from the bank.

Landing at the foot of the fortress, 7 October

On 7 October at 2.30 a.m. the artillery shifted its heaviest fire to the landing places. It was raining. The first pontoons of the Austro-Hungarian 59th Infantry Division set out from Zemun only after 4 a.m. and were caught in the light of Serbian searchlights and of the burning city. Many boats sank or drifted away with the current. Under the fire of machine guns and artillery, British and French guns among them, the III Battalion of the 74th Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Anatol Méttelét reached the bank below Kalemegdan. Its soldiers, wading knee-deep in the water, took in hand-to-hand fighting the railway embankment along the bank. It was defended by Serbian soldiers, gendarmes and several hundred volunteers from Syrmia, Serbs from the Austro-Hungarian side of the Sava. While the Serbs concentrated their fire on Méttelét, the IV Battalion of the 87th Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Peter landed unnoticed a little further on. By dawn 14 companies had got across to the bank. Then the crossings had to be halted, because more than two thirds of the pontoons had been sunk, smashed or carried away by the current.

West of the city, before dawn, the Germans put a battalion across onto the bank of the Sava and ten companies onto Great Gypsy Island, where all day they fought hand to hand for the footbridges leading to the Serbian bank. Little Gypsy Island fell only in the afternoon.

The hardest day was on the Danube embankment. General Živković threw all his reserves into the fighting to drive the landing force into the river. The Austrian artillery could not help its own men, because the opponents lay a few tens of metres apart on either side of the embankment, and there was no communication with the other bank. By early afternoon about 2,500 Austro-Hungarian soldiers, running out of ammunition and with heavy losses, were clinging only to the slope above the water. Serbian tradition links this day with the speech that Major Gavrilović made in front of the Jasenica café in Dorćol to soldiers preparing for a counter-attack:

Soldiers! At exactly three o’clock the enemy is to be crushed by your mighty charge, destroyed by your grenades and bayonets. The honour of Belgrade, our capital, must remain unstained. Soldiers! Heroes! The supreme command has struck our regiment from its roll. Our regiment has been sacrificed for the honour of Belgrade and the Fatherland. You need no longer worry about your lives, they no longer exist. So forward, to glory! For King and Fatherland! Long live the King! Long live Belgrade!

The text of the speech is known from a later publication by one of the participants in the fighting, then officer cadet Đorđe Roš, who was severely wounded and taken prisoner. In Serbia it became a model of a soldier’s address, but its exact wording and circumstances are a matter of tradition, not a record from the battlefield. The counter-attack did not drive the enemy into the Danube, and Gavrilović was severely wounded in it. The decisive role was played by the Austro-Hungarian monitors, which from 3 p.m. cruised behind Great War Island and shelled the Serbian batteries on Kalemegdan and on the Veliki Vračar hill. They drew the fire of the Serbian artillery onto themselves, and the Austrian infantry managed to hold out on the bank until dusk.

Before noon Živković had already asked the high command for the Timok Division, and its first battalions went into action before nightfall. The front-line commanders asked for the bled-white units to be withdrawn behind the city. The general refused and demanded another division and heavy artillery. The high command, however, judged that the situation was not so grave, and on the morning of 8 October ordered a counter-attack to be made once the whole Timok Division had arrived.

Fighting for the city, 8 October

During the night the pioneers ferried further units across to the Serbian bank, and by the morning of 8 October about 27 Austro-Hungarian companies were already standing at the northern edge of the city. The Serbs could not drive them into the river, but their artillery again prevented further crossings. The commander of the 59th Division, General Šnjarić, was wounded and the division was taken over by General Hrozny. The issue was decided on the western wing. The German 44th Reserve Division attacked on the bank of the Sava and all day rolled up the Serbian positions opposite Great Gypsy Island. At noon and in the afternoon both footbridges linking the island with the mainland fell into its hands, and in the evening the Germans reached the slopes of the Banovo Brdo hill west of the city.

In the afternoon Lieutenant-Colonel Peter established contact with the flotilla by light signals. The monitors Leitha and Körös smashed with direct fire the houses just behind the embankment in which the Serbs were holding out, and Peter led his intermingled units in an assault. In heavy house-to-house fighting the battalions of the 59th Division broke into the streets leading uphill from the Danube, east of the fortress. In the evening the Serbian artillery fell silent, and all night pontoons and ferries carried across the rest of the 59th Division’s infantry and almost all of both German reserve divisions. For these actions Peter and Méttelét received the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa, the highest Austrian war decoration.

Fall of the city, 9 October

Soon after midnight on 8–9 October General Živković concluded that the city could not be held and withdrew his battalions to the line of hills from Vračar through Žarkovo to Ostružnica, which they occupied at about 10 a.m. At dawn a battalion of the German 43rd Reserve Division entered the southern part of the city without a fight and occupied the Konak, the residence of the Serbian kings. At the same time units of the Austro-Hungarian 59th Division climbed Kalemegdan, and from 6 a.m. the black-and-yellow Habsburg flag flew over the old walls of the fortress. Around noon the Austro-Hungarian 9th Mountain Brigade passed through the deserted streets to the southern edge of the city and linked up with the Germans, and the 18th Mountain Brigade occupied the south-eastern exits from Belgrade.

In the afternoon Živković counter-attacked once more with the Timok Division through Žarkovo against the Germans who had taken Banovo Brdo, but two regiments of the 44th Reserve Division repulsed the attack. In the evening fighting swayed back and forth over the Veliki Vračar hill (now Zvezdara (PL)), which was finally held by an Austro-Hungarian battalion supported by the fire of the monitors. The Serbs were still holding on to the Dedinje hill, which they abandoned only on 10 October. By the evening of 11 October Kövess’s troops had occupied a semicircle of hills south of the city, which gave them a secure bridgehead for the further advance.

Losses

There are no precise figures for the losses of either side. According to the Austrian official history, by 9 October the Austro-Hungarian 59th Infantry Division, which suffered the heaviest losses, had lost more than a thousand men, and the entire German XXII Reserve Corps roughly the same. By 11 October the Serbs had lost more than 1,700 prisoners and 22 guns. Their losses in killed and wounded were certainly high, but the Austrian sources give no figures. Some Serbian regiments melted away to half, or even a third, of their strength, as Živković reported to the high command on 10 October.

Significance

The capture of Belgrade opened the way into the interior of Serbia for the Central Powers and allowed them to build bridges over the Sava and Danube. Kövess, however, could not move on at once. First he had to bring up heavy guns, and only a few days later the košava began to blow, a violent autumn wind off the Danube, which paralysed the crossings for many days. Getting out of the great bend of the rivers south of the city cost the Third Army another week of heavy fighting.

For Austria-Hungary the return to Belgrade, from which it had had to withdraw in December 1914, was a great satisfaction. The Austrian official history wrote that the army’s favourite song about Prince Eugene of Savoy, who took Belgrade in 1717, had for a year reminded the soldiers not only of his glory but also of the defeats of the first expeditions against Serbia. Recovering “the city and fortress of Belgrade” was the reparation the army had longed for. For the Serbs the defence of the capital became one of the symbols of the war, and Major Gavrilović, who survived his wounds and the later retreat through Albania, one of its heroes. According to Serbian tradition Mackensen himself, impressed by the bearing of the defenders, ordered a monument to be erected to the fallen defenders with an inscription in German and Serbian: “Here lie Serbian heroes”. Belgrade remained under Austro-Hungarian occupation until November 1918.