Second clash at Krivolak

The British chronology of the war records under 30 October 1915 a second action at Krivolak on the Vardar. The French 57th Infantry Division, which in the last days of October had reached Krivolak, had already crossed the river and occupied the heights on its eastern bank that dominated the valley. The Bulgarians tried to push it off them. The British and Austrian official histories do not describe this fight separately, and its date has to be reconstructed from more general accounts. It is known, however, that it was the beginning of increasingly heavy Bulgarian attacks on the French bridgehead, which in the first days of November cost the attackers bloody losses.

The bridgehead on Kara Hodjali

East of Krivolak, on the other side of the Vardar, rises the steep massif of Kara Hodjali. The British writer John Buchan, who described this fighting while the war was still going on, pointed out that the heights dominated the whole of this stretch of the valley. If the Bulgarians took them, the railway from Salonika, the only supply route of the French, would become useless. It was therefore decided to occupy them at all costs. The Vardar was swollen after the rains, there was no bridge, and the pontoons had not been brought up in time. The French crossed by an old ferry and climbed the slopes, from which they pushed back the Bulgarian advanced guards without much difficulty.

According to Buchan, two days later the Bulgarians, realising what they had lost, attacked in greater strength. They were repulsed only after a grenade fight at close quarters on the crest of the heights. As Buchan dates the capture of Krivolak itself to 27 October, this attack would fall precisely at the end of the month, on the days in which the British chronology places the second action.

The Bulgarians bring up reinforcements

For the time being the French faced a brigade of the Bulgarian 7th Infantry Division, part of the Second Army of General Georgi Todorov. According to the Austrian official history, on 30 October one of this division’s brigades occupied Veles and the heights west of it, and the next day moved towards the mouth of the Crna on the Vardar, where it seized an important railway bridge. The Bulgarians also began to bring up from near Štip two brigades of the 11th Division, earlier called the Macedonian Legion. It was a newly raised formation, still without combat experience and not fully trained.

The French did not have large forces. The whole 57th Division, commanded since 23 October by General Paul Leblois, had to hold about 25 kilometres of front along the Vardar, from Gradec to Krivolak. Only the ferry still led across the river. To the south-east, near the Bulgarian border, General Maurice Bailloud’s 156th Division covered the railway near Strumica station, and the British had only just received permission to cross the Serbian border and relieve some of the French units by Lake Doiran.

Before the decisive fighting

At the same time the fate of the whole expedition hung in the balance. On 29 and 30 October in London General Joseph Joffre argued to the British that the Serbian army must be saved, and obtained from them a promise to cover the railway from Salonika to Krivolak. The stretch from Krivolak to Veles was to be secured by the French. The British government stipulated, however, that if contact with the Serbs could not be established and maintained, the Allied troops would be withdrawn. The next day General Maurice Sarrail received a message from Vojvoda Radomir Putnik that the Serbs would try to retake Skopje with two divisions, together with a request for a French attack from the south.

Meanwhile the French strengthened the bridgehead on Kara Hodjali, which took the form of a semicircle around the heights. In the first days of November engineers built two ferry bridges across the Vardar, one French and one British. On 3 November troops of the 11th Division attacked the bridgehead. The French caught the attackers in open ground and decimated them with fire, and according to a Spanish observer cited by the British official history, the Bulgarians lost over 3,000 men in this one attack.