Serbs retake Štip and Veles

A British chronology of the war records under 25 September 1918 the Serbs’ recapture of Štip and Veles, two towns in Macedonia which the Bulgarians had taken in October 1915: Štip around 19 October, and Veles a day or two later. The date is accurate only for the first of them. According to Cyril Falls’s British official history, the Bulgarians abandoned Štip on the night of 24–25 September, and the Serbian Cavalry Division entered the town right behind them. Serbian accounts state that the cavalry took Štip on 25 September. Veles fell a day later: according to Falls and Serbian accounts, the Serbian First Army took it on 26 September, and the enemy’s last rearguards left the eastern part of the town before dawn on 27 September.

After the breakthrough

Ten days earlier the Serbs and French had broken through the front at Dobro Pole, and since then the Serbian armies had been advancing north. On 23 September the Serbian Second Army of Vojvoda Stepa Stepanović crossed the Vardar, and on 24 September the French and Serbs took Gradsko, where the railway from Salonika joined the light railway to Prilep. The Bulgarian front had been cut in two. In the east the Yugoslav Division reached the ridge between the Vardar and the Kriva Lakavica river and opened the way to Štip for the Serbian cavalry. In the west the Serbian First Army of General Petar Bojović advanced along both banks of the Vardar towards Veles, where the roads from Prilep over the Babuna Pass and from Gradsko converged. One of the two corps of the German Eleventh Army was retreating that way from the west.

Štip

Štip lay on the Bregalnica, on the road leading from the Vardar valley to the Bulgarian border and on towards Sofia. After its loss, Bulgarian army headquarters ordered on the morning of 25 September that the town be retaken: the 2nd Division was to attack from the north-west, and from the east a detachment of the First Army, 12 battalions and 12 batteries, assembled near Radoviš. The first units of the German 217th Division, brought from the Crimea, were to help. Nothing came of it. On the morning of 26 September the Serbian Morava Division forestalled the attack and drove the 2nd Division out of the village of Kišino, the detachment from Radoviš made no progress, and the Germans arrived only to cover the retreat. The same day the Serbian cavalry from Štip took Kočani, and the Yugoslav Division passed to the north of the town.

The confusion was all the greater because on 25 September crowds of mutinous soldiers from the shattered 2nd and 3rd Divisions flooded into Kyustendil, where Bulgarian headquarters stood, and forced it to give them trains to go home. According to Falls, headquarters ceased to function that day and on 27 September moved to Sofia.

Veles

On 25 September the Serbian First Army advanced along both banks of the Vardar, the Morava Division on the east bank and the Drina Division on the west. All day it pushed the enemy back from village to village and from ridge to ridge, until in the evening a hastily assembled division under the German General Dieterich made a stand on the last heights from which Veles could be defended. Made up of German Landsturm companies, the Bulgarian 66th Regiment and the remnants of shattered Bulgarian regiments, it defended itself, according to Falls, with real determination, and on 26 September there was bitter fighting south of the town. After dark the enemy rearguards left the west bank and blew up the bridge over the Vardar. For a few hours they held on in the eastern and northern parts of the town, and before dawn on 27 September they withdrew to the hills to the north.

On the morning of 27 September a French detachment under General Tranié reached Veles, sent over the Babuna Pass from Prilep to support the cavalry advancing on Skopje. Between the German and Bulgarian troops north of Veles and the other corps of the Eleventh Army, retreating along the road from Prilep to Kičevo, a gap 30 miles wide, nearly 50 kilometres, was opening up. According to Falls, the number of prisoners taken since the start of the offensive rose in these days to 10,000, and of captured guns to about 200. For the Serbs, recovering the towns they had lost in the autumn of 1915 was another stage in their return home. Almost exactly three years earlier the Bulgarians had seized the Bregalnica valley and Veles, cutting the Serbian army off from the French at Salonika.