French retake Pristina
- Category:
- Military operations
- Front:
- Balkan Front
- Date:
- 10 October 1918
- Author:
- Łukasz Skowroń
- Tags:
- France, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Germany
The British chronology of the war records under 10 October 1918 the French recapture of Pristina, the main town of the Kosovo plain. The Germans had taken it in November 1915, when the Serbian army was retreating from here across the mountains to the Adriatic. Sources disagree on the day the French entered the town. Some Serbian studies give 8 October, others, like the chronology, 10 October. The Austro-Hungarian war communiqué announced on 11 October that the imperial and royal troops had evacuated Pristina and Prizren.
Tranié’s force
After the armistice with Bulgaria General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey sent two columns north. The Serbian First Army advanced up the Morava valley towards Niš, and on its left flank, towards Kosovo, General Tranié’s force set off. According to Cyril Falls’s British official history it consisted of a brigade of the French 11th Colonial Infantry Division and two regiments of the Greek 3rd Division. It was to cover the march of the Serbian Second Army, which Franchet d’Espèrey was shifting from the right flank, near the Bulgarian border, to the left. The general did not want to send the Serbs through Bulgaria, as he feared incidents between the two hostile nations.
From Skopje the force marched on Kačanik, through the same gorge in which in November 1915 the Serbs had tried to break through southwards to the French. Now it was the Germans who were fleeing through it. Some of the German soldiers of General Fleck’s corps, cut off at the end of September west of Skopje, managed to escape capitulation: they burned their heavy transport and crossed by a mountain path from Tetovo to Kačanik. The French were hard on their heels and seized the rest of their transport and artillery. On 4 October they captured 30 guns near Kačanik, and on 7 October near Lipljan, already on the Kosovo plain, another 22. Falls was astonished that the Germans had managed to drag them so far along such a road at all.
Pristina
The Austrians did not defend Kosovo. Field Marshal Hermann Kövess von Kövesshaza, who on 10 October assumed supreme command of the Central Powers in the Balkans, decided to withdraw the troops behind the Danube and the Sava, and the units scattered across Kosovo and Albania fell back northwards. The French took Pristina without serious fighting and halted there. On 12 October an Austro-Hungarian communiqué admitted that the enemy had also taken Mitrovica. According to Falls the remnants of Fleck’s forces joined the German 11th Army, except for the rearguard, which was cut off. It turned west, through Montenegro, and after a remarkable trek reached the Bay of Kotor on 23 October, from where it sailed for Fiume.
The French entry ended almost three years of occupation of Kosovo. According to Falls, on 20 October Tranié’s force in Pristina began to be relieved by the Serbian Second Army, which went on north towards Peć, Kraljevo and Čačak. For the Serbs it was a return to the land from which in November 1915 they had begun the retreat through Albania.
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