The Salonika Front

The Salonika front grew out of an expedition that was meant to save Serbia and arrived too late. In October 1915 the troops of France and Britain landed at the Greek port of Salonika and moved north up the Vardar valley, but they failed to join the Serbs and in December returned to Greece. Instead of sailing away, they dug in around the city, and from the entrenched camp grew a front that ran across the whole of Macedonia, from the Albanian borderlands to the Struma valley. For almost three years the Allied armies, with the rebuilt Serbian army, the Italians, the Russians and from 1917 the Greeks as well, faced the troops of Bulgaria, supported by the Germans. The front moved little, and far more soldiers were put out of action by disease, above all malaria, than by bullets. In September 1918, however, the Allies broke through in the high mountains at Dobro Pole and within two weeks forced Bulgaria into an armistice.

Name and dates

In Polish literature the operations in Macedonia are called the Salonika front or the Macedonian front. The British speak of the Macedonian or Salonika campaign, and their official history, Cyril Falls’s two-volume work, is titled “Military Operations Macedonia”. The French write of the Eastern front (front d’Orient) and of their Army of the Orient. From 1916 the Allied forces in Macedonia were known as the Allied Armies of the East. For three years the Germans mocked them, calling the camp around Salonika the “Allied internment camp”.

On this page we adopt the dates 5 October 1915 – 30 September 1918. On 5 October the first French and British troops came ashore at Salonika, and at noon on 30 September 1918 the armistice with Bulgaria, signed the previous evening, came into force. On this front the fighting ceased, although the Allied armies marched on: the Serbs to Belgrade, others towards the Danube and Constantinople. During the war Serbia and Greece used the Julian calendar, so their dates are 13 days earlier. Bulgaria switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1916. All dates are given in the Gregorian calendar.

Background

Salonika had belonged to Greece only since the Balkan Wars. From this port the only railway to Serbia ran up the Vardar valley and on to Niš. This was the route by which supplies reached the Serbs, who in 1914 had three times repulsed the Austrians, the last time on the Kolubara. Greece was bound to Serbia by an alliance of 1913, but King Constantine I wanted to remain neutral, while Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos sought war on the side of the Entente.

In September 1915 Bulgaria announced mobilisation, and it became clear that it would soon attack Serbia together with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Venizelos demanded 150,000 Entente soldiers to replace the Serbian army on the Bulgarian border, and London and Paris promised them. There was nowhere to find so many men, however, so the first units were taken from the Dardanelles, where the Gallipoli campaign was under way: the French division of General Maurice Bailloud, soon renumbered the 156th Division, and the British 10th (Irish) Division of General Bryan Mahon. After a series of diplomatic reversals, on 2 October Venizelos asked for the troops to be landed, although his government lodged a formal protest.

The expedition to help Serbia (1915)

The landing began on 5 October, and that same day Venizelos resigned because the King refused to support his policy. The new government did not demand that the troops leave, but it remained neutral and had no intention of helping Serbia. On 6 October the armies of Field Marshal August von Mackensen attacked Serbia from the north, and a week later the Bulgarians struck from the east. On 12 October General Maurice Sarrail, commander of the French Army of the Orient, arrived at Salonika.

The French moved by rail up the Vardar. On 21 October they fought their first action against the Bulgarians near Strumica station, and from 24 October they held positions on the Vardar and the Crna Reka at Krivolak. The Bulgarian Second Army of General Georgi Todorov was faster, however: it took Veles and Skopje and cut the main Serbian forces off from the French. For a long time the British were not allowed to cross the Serbian frontier, and when in November they took over a sector from the French, they stood on bare ridges near Kosturino without winter equipment. When at the end of November the Serbian army, surrounded on three sides, began to retreat through the mountains of Montenegro and Albania, Sarrail ordered a withdrawal. On 3 December the French left the loop of the Vardar and the Crna Reka. On 7 and 8 December the Bulgarians broke the front of the British 10th Division in fog at Kosturino, and on 12 December the last Entente troops crossed the Greek border.

The Bulgarians halted at the frontier. The Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, did not want to push Greece into the arms of the Entente and forbade any entry into its territory. The British then wanted to evacuate Salonika, but the French, Russians, Italians and Serbs objected, and on 9 December the British government gave way. On 14 December Sarrail and Mahon agreed a line of defence on the hills some fifteen kilometres north of the city, from Lake Langadas to the Vardar.

The entrenched camp and the return of the Serbs (1916)

In the winter and spring of 1916 soldiers and local labourers dug trenches and put up barbed wire so dense that the camp was called the “Birdcage”. The troops who were to have saved Serbia now sat in a fortified bridgehead on Greek soil, and in Paris and London many regarded the whole expedition as a costly mistake. The soldiers, busy chiefly with digging, earned the nickname “the gardeners of Salonika”, attributed to Georges Clemenceau. On 16 January Sarrail took command of all Allied troops at Salonika. The British then had five divisions there, the French three, soon four.

Meanwhile the Serbian army was being rescued. Its remnants, which after the tragic retreat through the snowbound mountains had reached the Albanian coast, were carried by Allied ships to Corfu. There the Serbs rested, received French weapons and British uniforms and were organised into three armies. From April they were shipped to Salonika, and by the summer about 120,000 Serbian soldiers stood in Macedonia. The formal Supreme Commander was the Regent Alexander, and the Chief of Staff was General Petar Bojović. At the end of July the first Russians arrived, and in August the Italian 35th Division.

Greece meanwhile was losing what was left of its independence. In May the Bulgarians and Germans took Fort Rupel on the Struma without a fight, and in June the Entente forced Athens to demobilise the army and declared a state of siege in Salonika.

Florina, the Crna Reka bend and Bitola (1916)

Sarrail was preparing an offensive intended to tie down the Bulgarians when Romania entered the war. The Bulgarians forestalled him. On 17 August their First Army attacked on the western flank, took Florina and pushed the Serbs back to Lake Ostrovo, where, however, it stalled. In the east the Second Army, meeting no Greek resistance, reached the Struma and took Kavala, where in mid-September the Greek IV Corps gave itself up to the Germans. Indignation at the King’s passivity provoked a coup by Venizelos’s supporters in Salonika on 30 August. In October Venizelos himself arrived there to head the government of National Defence, which on 23 November declared war on Germany and Bulgaria. Thus began the National Schism, the split of Greece into two states.

On 12 September the Allies went over to the counter-offensive. The Serbs took Gornichevo, on 17 September the French and Russians entered Florina, and on 30 September the Serbian Drina Division secured the summit of Kaymakchalan, more than 2,500 metres above sea level. From the beginning of October the Serbs fought their way through the mountainous Crna Reka bend, while the French and Russians stormed the Bulgarian trenches on the plain south of Bitola. The Germans brought in battalions from other fronts to rescue their ally, and the Eleventh Army took over command of the sector. In mid-November the defence in the bend gave way, and on 19 November the Allies entered abandoned Bitola, the first sizeable Serbian town recovered since 1915. On the hills just beyond the town, however, the front came to a halt, and on 11 December the offensive was called off. By then Romania had been defeated.

Behind Sarrail’s back the struggle with the King went on. On 1 December Greek troops in Athens opened fire on an Entente landing party sent to compel the surrender of arms, and in response the Allies declared a blockade of royalist Greece.

A year in the trenches (1917)

In 1917 Sarrail tried once more. In March the French attacked west and north of Bitola without success, trying to push the enemy artillery back from the town, which remained under fire until September 1918. In spring an offensive was launched along the whole front. On the nights of 24–25 April and 8–9 May General George Milne’s British stormed the hills west of Lake Doiran and lost about 5,000 men. From 5 May the French, Serbs, Italians and Russians attacked in the Crna Reka bend and in the mountains above the Moglena (PL) basin, likewise without success. For the first time in the war the Serbs refused to continue attacking, and on 21 May Sarrail called off the offensive. It had cost the Allies about 14,000 men in all.

The most dangerous enemy, however, was malaria. Falls considered southern Macedonia probably the most malarial country in Europe. Mosquitoes from the marshes along the Vardar, the Struma and the lakes infected whole divisions, and the struggle against them was almost fruitless, because they flew in even from behind the enemy lines. In the summer of 1916 one British division, probably the 10th, had several thousand hospital admissions for malaria between June and October. The Bulgarians, as Falls noted, suffered very little from malaria. In September 1917, according to Falls, the Serbian army had 129,000 men on its ration strength but only 34,000 soldiers in the line and fewer than 20,000 fit for operations. The French and British carried thousands of men with chronic malaria who passed in and out of hospital.

In June the Entente settled the question of Greece. On 11 June the High Commissioner Charles Jonnart demanded the King’s abdication. The next day Constantine left Athens, leaving the throne to his son Alexander, and on 27 June Venizelos took power in the capital and the whole of Greece entered the war. Its army, however, still had to be rebuilt. In the summer the British, disappointed by the spring defeat, sent two divisions, the 60th and the 10th, two cavalry brigades and a large part of the heavy artillery to Egypt and Palestine. The Russian brigade, eaten away by the revolution, ceased to count. On 18 August a great fire destroyed between a third and a half of Salonika, more than 9,000 buildings. In the autumn Sarrail alienated almost all the Allies, and on 10 December the new French Prime Minister, Clemenceau, recalled him. His successor was General Adolphe Guillaumat.

Skra, Dobro Pole and the armistice (1918)

Guillaumat put the command in order, improved relations between the contingents and began preparing an offensive. On 30 May 1918 Greek divisions, supported by French artillery, took the Bulgarian salient of Skra di Legen in a few hours. It was the first major attack by the Greek army, and it proved that an army divided by the schism could fight. At the beginning of June Guillaumat left for Paris, threatened by a German offensive, and on 18 June General Louis Franchet d’Espérey took over command. In July the Italians and French carried out a successful but short-lived offensive in Albania.

At the beginning of September Franchet d’Espérey had 28 divisions: eight French, six Serbian, four British, one Italian and nine Greek, with a tenth Greek division on its way. The Serbian army had been reinforced by Yugoslav volunteers, most of them former Austro-Hungarian soldiers who had fallen into Russian captivity. Part of them formed the Yugoslav Division. The Bulgarians had as many battalions, but their army was war-weary, poorly supplied and increasingly distrustful of its German allies, who had withdrawn a considerable part of their own units from Macedonia. On the advice of Vojvoda Živojin Mišić, Franchet d’Espérey decided to strike where no one expected it: at the highest mountains on the whole front, above the Moglena basin.

At dawn on 15 September the Serbs and French went in to storm the Dobro Pole–Sokol–Vetrenik ridge and by evening had taken its summits. By 17 September three successive Bulgarian positions had fallen, and Serbian divisions poured through the breach, already setting foot on their own soil. On 18 and 19 September the British and Greeks stormed the positions at Doiran. They lost more than 7,000 men and failed to break the defence, but they tied down the Bulgarian First Army, which on 21 September abandoned its trenches of its own accord. Bulgarian regiments began to mutiny. On 23 September French cavalry took Prilep, on 26 September the Serbs took Veles, and on 29 September French cavalrymen, after a march across trackless country, rode into Skopje and cut the line of retreat of the German Eleventh Army.

The Bulgarian government had asked for a suspension of hostilities as early as 25 September. Franchet d’Espérey refused to halt operations but agreed to receive plenipotentiaries. Late in the evening of 29 September a convention on an armistice was signed at his headquarters in Salonika, and it came into force at noon on 30 September. Bulgaria undertook to demobilise its army, evacuate the occupied Greek and Serbian territories and place its roads and railways at the Allies’ disposal. The soldiers of the Eleventh Army standing west of the meridian of Skopje were to lay down their arms and go into captivity.

Casualties

There is no complete account of the losses on the Salonika front, and the figures from different sources cover different periods and categories. According to the British medical statistics quoted by Falls, the British lost in Macedonia 2,797 killed, 1,299 died of wounds, 16,888 wounded and 2,778 missing and taken prisoner. 3,744 men died of disease, and there were more than 480,000 hospital admissions for sickness, with the average strength of the army exceeding 200,000 men in 1917. Malaria alone accounted for more than 162,000 hospital admissions and 787 deaths, and in 1917–1918 almost 35,000 soldiers were sent home because of it.

According to Max Schiavon, the French lost on the Eastern front, excluding the Dardanelles, about 6,700 killed, 15,600 missing and 16,200 wounded, not counting deaths from disease. Many of them rest in the Zeitenlik military cemetery in Salonika. The Italians lost 8,324 men in Macedonia and 2,214 in Albania. Serbian losses on this front are estimated at several tens of thousands of men, and Greek losses in the whole war, according to American tables of 1924, at about 27,000, including about 5,000 killed and died. According to the same tables Bulgaria lost almost 267,000 men in the whole war, including 87,500 killed and died, the great majority of them on the Macedonian front. German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman losses on this front are not known.

Significance

For three years many politicians in London and Paris regarded the Salonika front as a useless theatre. The Central Powers conquered Serbia and Montenegro despite the Allied presence, and Romania despite the offensive at Bitola. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, carried across a sea full of submarines, stood still and fell sick, and several times the British wanted to pull out. Yet the troops in Macedonia tied down almost the whole Bulgarian army and part of the German one, and Salonika gave the Serbs a place where their army could be reborn. The Entente’s presence also decided the fate of Greece: from the coup in Salonika grew the Venizelos government, which in 1917 brought the whole country into the war.

In September 1918 the front that had been mocked made the first breach in the bloc of the Central Powers. Bulgaria was the first to lay down its arms, the Ottoman Empire was cut off from Germany, and Austria-Hungary was laid open from the south. The news of the Bulgarian request for an armistice contributed to the German Supreme Command’s decision that Germany too should seek a cessation of hostilities. On 3 October Tsar Ferdinand I abdicated. The Serbian army, which three years earlier had fled through the mountains of Albania, entered Belgrade on 1 November. Even so, as Falls wrote bitterly, the victors of Macedonia received no glory: the great events on the Western Front overshadowed their campaign both during the war and after it.