Bulgarians take Bitola

The British chronology of the war records under 2 December 1915 that Bulgarian troops occupied Bitola, known in Europe at the time as Monastir. The British press reported on 2 December that the Serbs were still holding out in the town, and on the following day that Monastir had fallen. According to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign and the Austrian official history, Bulgarian cavalry entered Bitola on 4 December. The same date is given by Bulgarian accounts, which write of 21 November in the Julian calendar, and by a German commemorative ribbon issued to mark the occupation of the town. The British history of the war published by Nelson wrote, on the other hand, that the Serbian units left Bitola on 5 December. The chronology’s date is thus two days earlier than in most sources.

A town by the Greek border

Bitola lay on the southern edge of the Pelagonia plain, about 15 kilometres from the Greek border. It was one of the largest towns of Serbian Macedonia, which Serbia had won in the First Balkan War, and an important road junction. From here a railway ran through Florina to Salonika. When in mid-November the Bulgarians took the Babuna Pass and Prilep, the weak Serbian units in Macedonia, a few battalions of the Bitola divisional district, fell back towards the town. They could not, however, hold it for long. In the first days of December the press reported that the Bulgarians had outflanked Bitola from the south-east, reached the Greek border and cut the railway to Salonika near Kenali.

Bitola was taken by the Bulgarian Cavalry Division of General Georgi Todorov’s Second Army, commanded by Colonel Ivan Stoykov. According to the Austrian official history, it entered the town together with a German cavalry squadron. The first reports in the British press even said that Bitola had been taken by the Austrians and Germans. The presence of the Germans had political significance. Berlin wanted to avoid anything that might alarm neutral Greece, and the chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, insisted that the Greek border must not be crossed “under any circumstances, not even by aircraft”.

The Serbs head for Albania

The French commander in Macedonia, General Maurice Sarrail, proposed to the Serbian detachment from Bitola that it withdraw with the French to Salonika. According to the British official history, however, its commander preferred to make for the Adriatic and join the rest of the Serbian army. Most of the Serbs therefore set off westwards, through Resen, Ohrid and Struga to Albania, and the Bulgarians followed them. According to the Austrian official history, only about 1,500 Serbs joined Sarrail’s army on the western bank of the Vardar.

The fall of Bitola closed the last route from Serbian Macedonia to Greece and exposed the left flank of the French, who in those same days began to fall back down the Vardar valley after the failed expedition to Krivolak. The Bulgarians halted short of the Greek border. Bitola remained in their hands for almost a year. In November 1916 the Allies recaptured it, and the town, lying from then on just behind the front line, was shelled by artillery and bombed from the air almost daily until 1918.