First Entente troops sail for Salonika

On 3 October 1915 the week-long wait for a decision from Athens ended on the island of Lemnos. On the night of 2–3 October the British cruiser HMS Doris, lying at Salonika, signalled to Mudros that she had the Greek government’s written permission to land troops. The French received orders from Paris to set off at once. Admiral John de Robeck, on the other hand, was to wait until Athens confirmed the consent. According to the British official historian of the naval war, Julian Corbett, the confirmation came “next day”. The net-laying ships and the first French transports sailed immediately, and in the evening the British battleship HMS Albion followed them with 1,500 soldiers on board, together with the second echelon of the French. On 5 October the ships carrying the French artillery and another 2,000 British troops sailed.

The British chronology of the war, from which the date of this article comes, states that on 3 October the Allied troops arrived at Salonika and the Greek government protested against the landing. More precise sources show events spread over several days. The protest of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos is dated 2 October. It was a reply to a note from the French minister giving advance notice of the troops’ arrival. Corbett’s account shows that the ships left Mudros on 3 and 4 October, and according to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign the first soldiers went ashore only on 5 October. Allied officers, however, were already in Salonika. The British Brigadier-General A. B. Hamilton had arrived there with a staff around 1 October to prepare the landing, and HMS Doris and the French cruiser Latouche-Tréville lay in the bay.

Where the troops came from

There was nowhere to find the 150,000 soldiers promised to Greece, so the first units were taken from the Dardanelles. The French sent a division from Cape Helles commanded by General Maurice Bailloud, soon renamed the 156th Division. Paris repeatedly and firmly ordered that before departure it be reorganised so as to consist solely of European troops, without colonial regiments. According to Venizelos’s account, this condition had been set in September by King Constantine I. The British withdrew by night from Suvla Bay the 10th Division of General Bryan Mahon, raised in Ireland from volunteers. The Turks did not interfere with the withdrawal, and by the evening of 1 October the division was assembled at Mudros. General Ian Hamilton kept on the peninsula the second of the divisions designated, because without it he could not have held the positions at Suvla.

The same expedition had already been under way two days earlier. On 1 October, when Venizelos, alarmed by a speech by Sir Edward Grey, withdrew his consent to the landing, HMS Doris turned back the French transports, which were already close to their destination. Only assurances from London and Paris that they had no intention of handing Macedonia to the Bulgarians persuaded the Prime Minister to ask for troops again.

A port on the road to Serbia

Salonika had belonged to Greece only since 1912. From this great port on the Thermaic Gulf a railway ran up the Vardar valley to Serbia and on to Niš, where the Serbian government was based. Supplies for the Serbian army passed through Salonika, and by the same route the Allies intended to come to its aid. The port was dangerous, however, because German submarines were operating in the Aegean. For this reason the first transports were accompanied by ships that were to close the entrance to the gulf with anti-submarine nets. Unloading was also hampered by the ongoing Greek mobilisation. The same railway and the same quays were being used by the Greek divisions which had been concentrating in Macedonia since the end of September.

The Greek protest preserved the appearance of neutrality, but neither the Prime Minister nor the king intended to oppose the landing by force. Venizelos regarded the arrival of the Entente troops as a trump card in his dispute with the king, who wanted to remain neutral. When the soldiers began to go ashore, it turned out that the Prime Minister would not win this dispute.