Crossing of the Sava and the Danube

During the night of 6–7 October 1915, after two days of bombardment, the Central Powers began crossing Serbia’s frontier rivers. On a stretch more than a hundred kilometres long, from the western outskirts of Belgrade to Ram on the Danube, hundreds of pontoons, boats and ferries put out onto the water in darkness and rain. The Sava was several hundred metres wide here, the Danube at Belgrade more than a kilometre. The attackers were helped by large river islands from which they could start the crossing, the defenders by the high right banks, from which they could see the whole flat plain on the Hungarian side. By the evening of 7 October German and Austro-Hungarian troops had seized bridgeheads at several points. The war chronicles of the time noted briefly under this day that the Austro-German army had forced the Danube, the Sava and the Drina.

At Belgrade and on the Sava

The heaviest fighting was for the capital itself. At 2.30 a.m. the artillery of General Hermann Kövess’s Austro-Hungarian Third Army shifted its fire onto the landing places, and after 4 a.m. pontoons carrying men of the 59th Infantry Division reached the shore at the foot of the Kalemegdan fortress. Lit up by searchlights, they came under fire from Serbian machine guns and guns, including British naval guns. According to the Austrian official history, more than two-thirds of VIII Corps’ pontoons were sunk, smashed or carried away by the current, and the landing party clung all day to the railway embankment below the fortress. West of the city the German XXII Reserve Corps landed on the Great Gypsy Island, today Ada Ciganlija, and fought for the footbridges to the far bank. We describe this fighting as the defence of Belgrade.

Further up the Sava the Austro-Hungarian XIX Corps of General Ignaz Trollmann was crossing. Mackensen had ordered it to cross the river at Kupinovo, but Trollmann, against orders, chose what he considered a more suitable place at Progar, where the Sava forms a wide loop. At 4 a.m., behind schedule, the first waves of the 17th Mountain Brigade and General Karl Schwarz’s Landsturm brigade set off there, supported by river monitors. By 7 a.m. the whole brigade was on the southern bank, but in the marshes in front of the village of Krtinska it was halted by Serbian fire. Opposite Boljevci General Wilhelm von Reinöhl’s 205th Landsturm Brigade had landed as early as 3.10 a.m. It reached the edge of the village of Zabrež, but there it was halted by the Serbian second-levy Drina Division, brought up from Obrenovac. In the evening at Boljevci, and during the night at Progar, sappers built bridges over the Sava. Both bridgeheads, however, remained stuck for the following days in the waterlogged bends of the river, which after torrential rain began to flood.

On the Danube

East of Belgrade the German Eleventh Army of General Max von Gallwitz was crossing. Its left wing, X Reserve Corps, had the easiest time: on 7 October it crossed on both sides of Ram without meeting serious resistance and by evening had taken the Orljak heights as a bridgehead for the further advance. In the centre IV Reserve Corps was crossing from Temes Island, about 20 kilometres long according to the British official history and separated from the Serbian bank only by a narrow arm of the Danube. On 7 October it managed to get only weak forces across, which the Serbs halted at the foot of the hill above Kostolac. All its infantry was on the far bank only the next day. On the right wing General Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps was still only shelling Smederevo. There the crossing began only on 9 October, on a river swollen by rain.

The infantry had to be followed by guns, horses, transport and ammunition, and for that bridges were needed. At Belgrade the Austrians and Germans built them within a few days, but the Eleventh Army was for a long time supplied only by ferries. When from 12 October the košava, a violent autumn wind from the east, raged over the Danube, traffic on the rivers at times came to a standstill, and Gallwitz’s troops fought with artillery short of horses and with a small stock of ammunition.

The Serbian response

The Serbs defended themselves fiercely, but had too few troops on the rivers. At Belgrade it was mainly battalions of the oldest reservists that fought, and along the Danube General Pavle Jurišić Šturm’s Third Army stood in an extended line of outposts. The high command sent the reserve Timok Division to the capital, and on 8 October also had to send to Smederevo the division that had until then stood in reserve facing Bulgaria, at Knjaževac. Every such move weakened the eastern front, where a Bulgarian attack was expected any day. The crossing of the Drina at Višegrad by the Austro-Hungarian 62nd Infantry Division, postponed to 8 October, failed, however. The first Landsturm detachments that reached the Serbian bank had to be withdrawn with heavy losses that same morning.