Entente landing at Salonika

On 5 October 1915 the first French and British troops began to come ashore in the port of Salonika. They had sailed from the Dardanelles to cross neutral Greece and come to the aid of Serbia, which Austria-Hungary and Germany were about to attack any day, and soon Bulgaria as well. The landing, preceded by a week of diplomatic twists and turns, took place under a formal protest from the Greek government, but with the consent of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. Before the soldiers had pitched their tents, Venizelos had ceased to be prime minister. So began the presence of Entente troops in Macedonia, out of which grew the Salonika front, which lasted until the end of the war.

First ashore

The French were the first to land. Their division, commanded by General Maurice Bailloud and soon renamed the 156th Infantry Division, had come from Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula. At Paris’s demand it had been reorganised before departure so as to consist solely of European troops. According to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign, all its fighting troops were ashore within 48 hours, although the regimental transport kept arriving for many days. Venizelos’s biographer Vincent Seligman writes that the first units disembarked in the afternoon.

The same day the headquarters of the British 29th Brigade and two battalions of the 10th Division landed: the 6th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles and the 6th Battalion of the Leinster Regiment. Some of them arrived aboard the battleship HMS Albion, which had brought 1,500 men from Mudros. Unloading was hurried and rather disorderly. The ships had been loaded at Mudros as quickly as possible, regardless of what went into which of them. The British had no transport and struggled to carry their tents to a camp set up by the road to Serres. Within a few days the entrance to the bay was closed by British anti-submarine nets. The people of Salonika received the soldiers with indifference, while the local merchants promptly raised their prices. The first days passed in torrential rain, and the camps quickly turned into a bog.

The British delay had lasting consequences. The French, who had arrived first, took the best camp sites, rented buildings and took control of the railway. All this was hard to arrange, because the Greek mobilisation was under way in Macedonia, and the port and the only railway line, along the Vardar valley, were needed by both sides.

News from Athens

Before the day was out, news reached London that Venizelos had resigned. King Constantine I had refused to back his policy, although parliament had only just given the prime minister a vote of confidence. The expedition lost the purpose for which it had been sent. Britain was sending troops only to help Greece fulfil its obligations to Serbia, and now it was almost certain that Greece would not fulfil them. It had been agreed earlier that no forces the Allies could send would suffice without the co-operation of the Greek army. Now the Entente troops could at best count on Greek neutrality, and at worst had to reckon with Greek hostility.

On the morning of 6 October Lord Kitchener telegraphed to General Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli: “Venizelos, as you probably know, has resigned, and the whole question of the landing of troops at Salonika is in great doubt.” He ordered that units which had not yet sailed be held back. The commander of the 10th Division, General Bryan Mahon, had been at sea for two hours aboard a destroyer when he was ordered by wireless to return to Mudros. Several battalions which had sailed before the order arrived nevertheless reached Salonika on 6 October. The next day the Dardanelles Committee agreed that the troops should proceed, and on 8 October Mahon reached Salonika. The British government, however, did not yet regard itself as committed to a campaign in Macedonia.

The Calais meeting

On the same day, 5 October, Kitchener and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, met the French ministers of war and marine, Alexandre Millerand and Victor Augagneur, at Calais. They settled how to provide the 150,000 troops promised to Greece. The French were to send a brigade of marine infantry, another brigade, two cavalry divisions and an infantry division, 64,000 men in all according to Corbett. The British undertook to transfer three divisions from France and to help their allies with transport. Even then the promised number would have been about 20,000 short. The conference still worked on the assumption that Venizelos was in power, and Kitchener learnt of his fall immediately after it.

The two allies’ plans also differed. The French, convinced that they had promised only to cross Greek territory to Serbia, ordered Bailloud to move straight on to Niš. The British did not want to move from Salonika until it was certain that Greece would enter the war. After the fall of Venizelos Paris cancelled the order to march. Bailloud was to wait in Salonika for General Maurice Sarrail, appointed commander of the French Army of the Orient, who left Paris on 6 October and reached Salonika on 12 October.

Too little and too late

The next day the Austro-German offensive against Serbia began. The British official historian Cyril Falls wrote that the situation would have been ludicrous had it not been tragic, and that the landing most likely came too late to save Serbia in any case. The British author G. F. Abbott, sympathetic to the king, wrote that the Greeks, who had been promised 150,000 men, found that some 20,000 had arrived at Salonika, and that within a few hours confidence in Athens turned into panic. The Entente forces did not reach the promised number for many months.

The new Greek government did not demand that the troops leave. According to Seligman it promised them every facility, but remained neutral and had no intention of helping Serbia. The Entente troops stayed in Salonika as uninvited guests in a neutral country. As early as mid-October the French moved north by rail towards the Serbian border.