Bulgaria starts the Second Balkan War

On the evening of 29 June 1913 (16 June in the Julian calendar, then in use in Bulgaria) the Bulgarian Fourth Army began firing on Serbian positions in Macedonia, and during the night and at dawn on 30 June it went over to the attack. At the same time the Second Army struck at the Greeks. Nobody declared war. Only a month earlier Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks had been allies who together had taken almost all of Turkey’s lands in Europe. Now they had fallen out over the spoils, and an attack that in Sofia was meant to be no more than a brief show of force opened the Second Balkan War.

The quarrel over Macedonia

The foundation of the Balkan League was a Bulgarian-Serbian treaty of March 1912. Its secret annex divided Macedonia in advance: the lands east of the Rhodopes and the Struma were to go to Bulgaria, those north and west of the Šar Mountains to Serbia, and the line through the disputed belt in between was, if necessary, to be decided by the Tsar of Russia as arbiter. The war, however, went differently from what had been expected. The Serbs occupied most of Macedonia, including Bitola and Ohrid, which the treaty had promised to the Bulgarians, and the Greeks entered Salonika. Meanwhile the Bulgarian army was bleeding itself white in Thrace, before Adrianople and Çatalca. When the Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 closed the war with Turkey, Serbia demanded a revision of the agreement. It argued that the great powers, by creating Albania, had cut it off from the Adriatic, and that it had itself sent the Bulgarians 50,000 soldiers for the siege of Adrianople, although the treaty did not require it. On 1 June Serbia and Greece concluded a secret alliance against Bulgaria.

On 8 June Nicholas II sent identical telegrams to the kings of Bulgaria and Serbia offering arbitration. Both sides accepted with reservations. In Sofia the moderate prime minister Ivan Geshov was replaced by Stoyan Danev, and the army pressed for a quick decision. The soldiers, under arms since the autumn, wanted to go home for the harvest. The deputy commander-in-chief, General Mihail Savov (PL), wrote on 21 June to the commander of the Fourth Army that the matter had to be settled within ten days: “we shall have either war or demobilisation”. Two days before the fighting broke out Romania, encouraged by Russia, warned Sofia that in the event of a new war it would keep complete freedom of action.

Savov’s order

The government finally opted for arbitration in St Petersburg, and Danev was getting ready to leave. A Russian gunboat was waiting for him at Varna. On 28 June, however, Savov ordered the Fourth Army to attack the Serbs “as energetically as possible” along the whole line, without committing all its forces, and to secure a foothold on the right bank of the Bregalnica. The attack was to begin the following evening with rifle fire and to turn into an assault during the night and at daybreak. In a further telegram the general explained that the operations against the Serbs and Greeks were being undertaken “without a formal declaration of war”: they were to raise the army’s spirits, hasten Russia’s decision and seize as much disputed land as possible “until the European powers intervene to stop our military action”.

The Bulgarians argued for a long time over who had really been behind the order. Savov later claimed that he had been carrying out instructions, and a version circulated that Tsar Ferdinand had forced him to do it. The international commission of the Carnegie Endowment, which investigated both wars, wrote in 1914 that the ministers who favoured peace learned of the fighting, to their astonishment, only the following evening.

Defeat on every front

On the first day the Bulgarians took several positions, but they soon stalled. When the news reached Salonika, the Greeks ordered the Bulgarian detachment that shared the garrison with them to lay down its arms, and when it refused, they forced it to surrender with artillery. On 1 July the Bulgarian government made the army halt the offensive, and Savov lost his post, which was taken over by Radko Dimitriev. The Serbs and Greeks, however, could no longer be stopped. The troops of King Constantine took Kilkis on 4 July after a three-day battle, and Radomir Putnik’s Serbs threw back the Bulgarians on the Bregalnica. Greece and Serbia proclaimed a state of war on 2 and 9 July, and Montenegro came to the Serbs’ aid.

Around 10–11 July Romania entered the war. Its troops marched into Bulgaria without meeting resistance and halted about 20 km from Sofia. On the other side the Turks moved: on 22 July Enver’s troops entered Adrianople, abandoned by the Bulgarians, without a fight. In mid-July Danev resigned and Vasil Radoslavov formed a government. On 30 July a peace conference met in Bucharest, and the next day an armistice came into force. The war had lasted little more than a month, and in it Bulgaria threw away most of what it had won the year before. The desire to recover Macedonia weighed two years later on its decision to join the Central Powers.