Bulgaria in the First World War

Bulgaria was the last state to join the Central Powers, in October 1915, and the first of them to leave the war. On 14 October 1915 Tsar Ferdinand I proclaimed a manifesto on war with Serbia, counting on regaining the Macedonia lost in 1913. Together with Germany and Austria-Hungary the Bulgarians conquered Serbia, and then for almost three years held the front in Macedonia. On 29 September 1918, after that front collapsed, Bulgaria signed the Armistice of Salonica, and at noon on 30 September the fighting stopped.

The road to war

In 1912 Bulgaria, together with Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, fought Turkey in the First Balkan War. The allies, however, quarrelled over the spoils. On the night of 29–30 June 1913 the Bulgarians, without a declaration of war, attacked the Serbs and Greeks in Macedonia, and a month later they were fighting five neighbours. The Peace of Bucharest of 10 August 1913 took from Bulgaria southern Dobruja and most of Macedonia. The desire to regain Macedonia after this defeat was shared by most of society.

Entry into the war

In the summer of 1914 an exhausted Bulgaria declared neutrality, but the tsar and Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov leaned towards the Central Powers from the start. For a year both sides bid for Bulgaria. The Entente offered eastern Thrace up to the Enos–Midia line and part of Macedonia, but could give no more without breaking with Serbia. The Central Powers could promise more, because they were paying at someone else’s expense.

In the summer of 1915 the Russians were retreating from Galicia and Poland, and the Allies were stuck at Gallipoli. The tsar concluded that Germany would win. On 6 September Bulgaria concluded in Sofia a secret alliance with Germany, which promised it Serbian Macedonia, and at Pless a military convention. Turkey ceded it the Maritsa valley with the railway to the Aegean port of Dedeagach. Late in the evening of 22 September the tsar signed the decree on general mobilisation, although Radoslavov kept assuring everyone of “armed neutrality”.

The decision was taken in a narrow circle. Few people knew of the negotiations, and even the general staff learned their purpose only at the last moment. On 17 September the tsar received the leaders of the opposition, among them the peasant tribune Aleksandar Stamboliyski. The opposition, including the Democratic leader Aleksandar Malinov, warned the tsar against a war on the side of the Central Powers and predicted a second national catastrophe. Historians nevertheless acknowledge that the tsar did not drag Bulgaria into the war against its will. The choice of 1915 seemed rational, because the Central Powers were then winning on every front. On 14 October Bulgaria took the side of the Central Powers and attacked Serbia from the east.

At the fronts

The commander-in-chief, Nikola Zhekov, placed the First Army under Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who commanded the whole expedition against Serbia, while the Second Army of General Georgi Todorov was to enter Serbian Macedonia. In mid-October the Bulgarians cut the Niš–Salonica railway at Vranje, on 22 October they entered Skopje, and on 5 November Niš, Serbia’s wartime capital. In mid-December the last Entente troops left Serbian Macedonia, and the Bulgarians stood on the Greek border.

There they halted at the demand of the Germans, who did not want to push neutral Greece into the Entente camp. This allowed the Allies to entrench themselves at Salonica. In May 1916 Bulgarian and German troops occupied the Greek Fort Rupel on the Struma, and in August the Bulgarian First Army attacked the Serbs at Florina. In the autumn the situation was reversed. In the Battle of the Crna River the Allies began to push the Bulgarians and Germans out of the mountains, and on 19 November they entered Bitola, the first Serbian town to be recovered.

On 1 September 1916 Bulgaria declared war on Romania to regain Dobruja. On 6 September the Third Army of General Stefan Toshev took the fortress of Tutrakan, capturing about 28,000 soldiers, and on 22 October Bulgarians and Germans entered Constanța, Romania’s main port. The prize, however, turned bitter. The Peace of Bucharest of May 1918 gave Bulgaria only southern Dobruja with a narrow strip in the north, because the Turks were also bargaining for the rest. Public opinion regarded it as a defeat.

On the eastern wing the Bulgarian Second Army marched in August 1916 into Eastern Macedonia, which Bulgaria had lost in 1913. On 11 September the Greek IV Corps, surrounded at Kavala, gave itself up to the Germans so as not to fall into Bulgarian captivity, and the next day the Bulgarians occupied the town. In 1917 the Macedonian front almost stood still. General Sarrail’s spring offensive broke down both on the Vardar and at Doiran, where the Bulgarians repulsed the British. On 30 May 1918 the Greeks stormed the Bulgarian salient of Skra di Legen and took about 2,000 prisoners.

The home front

Victories brought hunger, high prices and dependence on Germany, which shipped food out of the country. Bulgarian soldiers lacked food and uniforms, and their families went hungry. The Germans, who commanded a large part of the front in Macedonia, carried off grain and took battery after battery and battalion after battalion to other fronts. Bulgaria occupied Serbian Macedonia and the Morava valley. According to some historians Bulgarian atrocities sparked the Toplica uprising in 1917. On 21 June 1918 the tsar appointed Malinov’s government, and the cabinet of Radoslavov, which had taken Bulgaria into the war and failed over Dobruja, stepped down.

The end of the war and the toll

On 15 September 1918 the Serbs and French took the Dobro Pole ridge, and the Vardar offensive shattered the Bulgarian army within days. The army was falling apart. On 27 September mutinous soldiers proclaimed a republic at Radomir and marched on Sofia. Meanwhile Malinov’s government asked for a ceasefire, and on 29 September its delegates signed the armistice. Bulgaria had to demobilise its army at once and leave the occupied Greek and Serbian lands, and about 150,000 soldiers standing west of Skopje were to be handed over to the Entente as hostages. The mutiny was crushed outside the capital on 30 September. The government defended it with loyal units, the cadets of the military school and the German 217th Division, brought in haste from the Crimea.

On 3 October Tsar Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his son Boris III and left the country. In 1919 the agrarian leader Stamboliyski, who in 1915 had been sentenced to life imprisonment for opposing the war, became prime minister. On 27 November 1919 Bulgaria signed the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine. In it Bulgaria ceded western Thrace to Greece, and with it access to the Aegean Sea, southern Dobruja to Romania, and strips on its western border to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It had to pay 2.25 billion gold francs in reparations, and its army could number only 20,000 men.

When it entered the war Bulgaria had 616,680 men under arms, over 12 per cent of the population. According to the US War Department, 1,200,000 Bulgarians served over the whole war, although the Bulgarian government gave only 400,000. Between 87,500 soldiers according to the Bulgarian War Ministry and 102,000 according to Ellis and Cox were killed. Together with civilians, losses came to 3.4 per cent of the population.