Serbs retake Belgrade again

On 1 November 1918 troops of the Serbian First Army under Vojvoda Petar Bojović entered Belgrade. The Serbian capital, taken by the Germans and Austrians in October 1915, had been occupied for three years. Serbia still used the Julian calendar, so in Serbian documents of those days the liberation of the city is dated 19 October. Today Belgrade celebrates the anniversary on 1 November.

Pursuit to the Danube

After the armistice with Bulgaria the Serbian First Army advanced north up the Morava valley. On 12 October it recovered Niš, and on 20–23 October it broke the resistance of German and Austro-Hungarian divisions at Paraćin. According to Cyril Falls’s British official history, the enemy was by then fighting only delaying actions. Field Marshal Hermann Kövess von Kövesshaza, who commanded the Central Powers’ forces in the Balkans, decided to withdraw them behind the Danube and the Sava. The crossing on the stretch from Smederevo to Šabac began on 25 October. The troops crossed by military bridges and by steamer, covered by monitors of the Austro-Hungarian Danube Flotilla. The retreat was orderly and ended on 1 November.

1 November

According to Serbian accounts, the first komitadji partisans appeared in the city’s streets in the morning. At about 10.30 a.m. a cavalry squadron of the Danube Division rode into Belgrade and reached the Kalemegdan fortress above the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. At about 1 p.m. the occupier’s last soldiers withdrew to the far bank, blowing up the bridges behind them, including the railway bridge over the Sava. At about 3 p.m. the Serbian Morava Division and Danube Division stood on the line Veliki Vračar–Banjica–Topčider–Banovo brdo, and the city was free. Falls writes that the last boats had barely reached the Hungarian bank opposite Belgrade when Bojović made his triumphant entry into the capital. The Serbian command wanted to spare the city. It was not shelled, so that the destruction of 1915 would not be repeated.

Belgrade was ruined and plundered. According to Serbian sources, before leaving German soldiers looted the shops in the centre, from Slavija Square to Terazije, and cut off the water and electricity supply. The population, about 90,000 before the war, had fallen by roughly half during the occupation. Even so, the people greeted the soldiers with joy. It was the second time in this war that the Serbs had returned to their capital. In December 1914 they had retaken it after less than two weeks of Austro-Hungarian occupation.

Serbia free

On the same day patrols of the Serbian Second Army reached the Drina. As Falls summed up, Serbia had been entirely cleared of the enemy, six weeks after the breakthrough at Dobro Pole. This was the limit of the objective officially set for the armies by the Allied command, namely the line of the Danube. The Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in the East, General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, told his subordinates, however, that he did not intend to stop at the river an hour longer than necessary. In the following days delegations from the Banat, Syrmia and Zagreb began arriving in Belgrade asking for Serbian troops to be sent, and the First Army crossed the Danube and the Sava into the lands of former Hungary.