Serbs retake Belgrade

On 15 December 1914 Serbian troops returned to Belgrade. The Austro-Hungarians, who had taken the capital on 2 December, held it for less than two weeks. During the night of 14–15 December their Fifth Army crossed back over the Sava and the Danube. Serbia had been cleared of the invader’s troops.

The British chronology of the war calls the campaign that ended that day the second Austrian invasion of Serbia. Polish, Serbian and German historiography, however, distinguishes three offensives in 1914: the August one, which ended in defeat on Mount Cer, the September one on the Drina, and the November one, which the Serbs smashed on the Kolubara. This is also the reckoning we follow on our site.

The decision to retreat

After the defeat of the Sixth Army, whose remnants had fled across the Sava by 13 December, only the Fifth Army of General Liborius von Frank remained in Serbia, holding the hills south of Belgrade. On 13 December the Austro-Hungarian Army High Command demanded that its defeat be avoided at all costs, since otherwise the monarchy’s southern border would be left undefended. General Oskar Potiorek therefore asked Frank whether he was sure he could hold the city. Frank replied that he could guarantee neither holding Belgrade nor a safe retreat across the river. In a written report he added that after seven weeks of fighting his army had dwindled to about 40,000 men and that the fortifications around the city were not ready. The courier carrying the report was held up by a car breakdown, so the decision was put off until the morning.

On 14 December the corps commanders came to Frank in person to convince him that further defence was pointless. Potiorek arrived in Zemun, where he heard from Frank by telephone that Belgrade could not be held. He then gave the order to retreat across the river, and at noon Frank issued detailed orders to the army.

The last night

Throughout 14 December heavy fighting went on in the hills surrounding the city. The Serbian Second and Third Armies and the Belgrade defence troops attacked from the south and west. At about 4 p.m. the Serbs took the heights near the village of Kumodraž, and the Landsturm soldiers, falling back in disorder, stopped only in Laudon’s old entrenchments on the edge of the city. The Serbs did not push further, however, and after dark the fighting gradually died down.

During the night, in a city plunged into total darkness, columns of troops and wagons crowded at the crossings. Units crossed by the pontoon bridge, the railway bridge and the barge bridge, and some of the troops were ferried across by steamers near the village of Višnjica, east of the city. The crossing was covered by the river monitors of the Danube Flotilla, whose fire kept the Serbs at a distance. By 8 a.m. on 15 December most of the troops were on the far bank. The pontoon bridge was dismantled and saved, while the barge bridge had to be partly destroyed by the army’s own artillery. At 11 a.m. the rearguard defending the bridgehead crossed the railway bridge, which was then blown up. The group evacuated by ferry did not dare sail upstream to Zemun in daylight and landed at Pančevo. Its commander, General Schön, went back by ship in person for about 800 soldiers who had gathered on the bank near Višnjica.

The Serbs return

Vojvoda Radomir Putnik had expected the enemy to abandon the city on his own and halted the pursuit in order to spare the capital, where few inhabitants remained. Belgrade was to be occupied only by a cavalry division and one regiment of the Second Army. According to the Austrian official history, the first to approach the city in the morning was a battalion of the Serbian Combined Division, followed by the cavalry. Serbian sources say that the cavalrymen rode from Slavija Square all the way to the Kalemegdan fortress above the confluence of the Sava and the Danube.

According to Serbian accounts, the regent and commander-in-chief Alexander Karađorđević entered the city the same day, and some sources say he was accompanied by his father, King Peter I. The inhabitants greeted the soldiers joyfully. The city, however, had been damaged by shelling, and the bridges over the Sava had been blown up.

The end of the invasion

The recapture of Belgrade ended the third invasion of Serbia. In less than two weeks from the start of the Serbian counter-offensive, an army that Vienna had already considered beaten had driven Potiorek’s forces out of the whole country. Austria-Hungary had suffered one of the most painful defeats of the first year of the war, and Potiorek himself lost his command at the end of December. Calm settled over the Serbian front, and it was to last until the autumn of 1915.