Blockade of the coast of Greek Macedonia

The British chronology of the war records under 19 September 1916 that the Allies began a naval blockade of the coast of Greek Macedonia from the mouth of the Struma to the mouth of the Mesta. Contemporary sources do not agree on this. The American Year Book writes that a blockade of the Greek coast from the mouth of the Struma to the Bulgarian frontier was declared by the French official gazette, the Journal officiel, of 20 September, as a measure directed against the Bulgarians, who had occupied Kavala, although in the same yearbook’s calendar the blockade appears under 16 September. According to The Times History of the War, it was announced on 20 September that the admiral commanding the Allied fleet had given notice of a blockade of the stretch between the mouth of the Mesta (Nestos) and the village of Chaiaghizi at the mouth of the Struma, which included the whole Gulf of Kavala.

A Greek shore in Bulgarian hands

It was the coast of a neutral state that was being blockaded, but not because of the Greeks. At the end of August Bulgarian troops, supported by the Germans, occupied almost all of Eastern Macedonia up to the Struma, just as in the spring they had occupied Fort Rupel, and the government in Athens forbade the army to resist. The Bulgarians entered the forts around Kavala, and according to the British official history of operations in Macedonia they occupied the town itself on 12 September, when most of the Greek IV Corps gave itself up to the Germans. In this way Bulgaria gained the port it had sought since the Balkan Wars, and with it the whole Greek shore of the Aegean Sea between the Struma and the Mesta.

On the stretch east of the Mesta, as far as the mouth of the Maritsa, the Allies had been blockading the Bulgarian coast since October 1915. The new blockade moved that limit westward, to the line of the Struma, along which British troops faced the Bulgarians. In practice the whole Aegean coast in Bulgarian hands was closed to shipping. It was not, however, a blockade of Greece itself. The earlier, undeclared blockade of the Greek coasts of June 1916 had been suspended when Athens accepted the demands of the powers, and according to the American yearbook it was officially lifted on 3 July.

Warships off Kavala

The Allied fleet had been operating off this shore since the Bulgarian invasion. According to the Greek history of the country’s part in the war, the Allies announced a blockade of the port of Kavala as early as 23 August. The Times History of the War writes that when the Bulgarians entered the forts, two British monitors and a cruiser shelled the occupied fortifications, and on 28 August the monitors shelled Bulgarian troops at the mouth of the Struma. In the first week of the occupation British naval aircraft bombed the Kavala area eight times. In September warships repeatedly shelled the enemy around the village of Neochori near the mouth of the Struma. According to reports from the Bulgarian side, the Allied fleet cruised off the coast in front of Kavala every day. Opposite Kavala lay the island of Thasos, occupied by the French in June, to which some of the Greek soldiers from Kavala fled in mid-September.

The blockade was meant to cut the occupied shore off from supplies by sea. It also hit the Greek inhabitants of these lands, however, thousands of whom, as the New York monthly Current History wrote, were fleeing the invader without means of subsistence. For the supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos, the loss of Kavala was the best proof that the king’s policy was leading the country to disaster. A few days later Venizelos left Athens to place himself at the head of the movement which in Salonika had already renounced its allegiance to the royal government.