Bulgarians take Kumanovo and Skopje

On 22 October 1915 troops of the Bulgarian Second Army of General Georgi Todorov entered Skopje, the chief town of Serbian Macedonia, called Üsküb by the Turks. According to the British history of the war published by Nelson, the Bulgarians entered the town late in the afternoon. Bulgarian sources state that Skopje was taken after fighting with the Serbs by the 24th Black Sea Infantry Regiment, and date it to 9 October in the Julian calendar, that is 22 October. The British chronology of the war also records the capture of Kumanovo under the same day, but that town fell earlier. The Austrian official history and Serbian and Bulgarian sources agree that the Bulgarians reached it on 20 October.

The march of the 3rd Division

Both towns were taken by the Bulgarian 3rd Infantry Division, the right wing of Todorov’s army. In the first days of the war one of its regiments reached the South Morava and cut the railway from Niš to Salonika at Vranje, while the main body took Kriva Palanka near the border. On 18 October the division captured Serbian positions on the hills west of the town, around the village of Stracin, and moved on Kumanovo. Three years earlier, in October 1912, the Serbs had won a great victory over the Turks here, which opened the way to Macedonia for them. Now they defended themselves with weak forces, largely made up of recruits and volunteers, and could not stop the Bulgarians. On 22 October, as one brigade of the 3rd Division entered Skopje, the second stood at Vranje and the third was marching on Bujanovac. The same day the 7th Division, which had passed through Štip, reached Kumanovo, and the cavalry division was already at Veles.

Macedonia cut off

The loss of Skopje was a first-rate disaster for Serbia. The town was the junction of all the roads in the southern part of the country. There the Bulgarians cut the link between the Vardar valley and the Morava valley, closed the roads south, to Prilep and Bitola, and also the road north, through the gorge at Kačanik, to the Kosovo Field. With Veles, the whole Vardar valley north of the points the French had reached was in Bulgarian hands. Crowds of refugees filled the roads to the south-west, and Serbia appealed to the Allies once more, in desperation, for help.

Vojvoda Radomir Putnik, whose armies in the north were falling back before the Germans and Austrians, issued on 22 October itself the first orders preparing a further retreat. That same evening Field Marshal August von Mackensen ordered the German and Austro-Hungarian armies to push the main Serbian forces into the interior of the country and destroy them there in a decisive battle. The Bulgarians, already standing in Skopje and at Vranje, were cutting off the Serbs’ way south. In the last days of October the remnants of the Serbian garrison of Skopje, according to Nelson about 5,000 men, took up positions on the hills at the mouth of the gorge at Kačanik. At the beginning of November the Serbs still tried to break through this way to the south, to the French.