Serbs take Kaymakchalan

On 30 September 1916 the soldiers of the Serbian Drina Division finally took the summit of Kaymakchalan, the highest point of the Nidže range, which rises, according to different measurements, to 2,521–2,524 metres. The date of 30 September is given consistently by the British official history of the operations in Macedonia, the Austrian official history and the British journalist Gordon Gordon-Smith, who accompanied the Serbian army. All of them use the Gregorian calendar. Serbia was then still reckoning dates by the Julian calendar, so in Serbian documents of the period the same day is 17 September.

The mountain above Bitola

The frontier between Greece and Serbia, drawn after the Balkan Wars, ran across the summit. Whoever held Kaymakchalan looked down on the bend of the Crna River and the plain of Bitola. Gordon-Smith wrote that the Bulgarians had fortified the mountain all summer, until it bristled with trenches and wire from foot to summit. As long as they held it, they could bar the Serbs’ descent to the Crna and the Bitola plain. The mountain was therefore the key to the Bulgarian defence east of the river. According to the English Wikipedia, it was defended by the 1st Brigade of the Bulgarian 3rd Balkan Infantry Division.

The Serbs began to climb Kaymakchalan on 12 September, the first day of General Maurice Sarrail’s counter-offensive. The Drina Division belonged to the Serbian Third Army. It attacked bare, rocky slopes where the soldiers had nowhere to hide from the Bulgarian machine guns. Serbian accounts describe how trenches could not be dug deep, because rock lay beneath a thin layer of earth, so the infantrymen sheltered behind flat stones. Meanwhile, to the west, the Serbs took Gornichevo, and the French and Russians retook Florina.

The summit taken, lost and retaken

According to Gordon-Smith, the Serbs gained a foothold on the mountain on 17 September and on 18 September took its highest ridge. The British official history says that by about 20 September they were already in possession of the summit, but a Bulgarian counter-attack drove them off the top. The Bulgarians brought up fresh troops from four different divisions. Their attack began on 24 September and reached its climax two days later. Gordon-Smith called it the bloodiest battle of the whole campaign. According to the English Wikipedia, between 26 and 30 September the summit changed hands several times.

The Bulgarians paid an enormous price for this. Gordon-Smith wrote that their companies of 280 men had melted to 90 bayonets, and that in battalions only four of fifteen officers were left. One Bulgarian regiment was said to have lost 73 officers and 3,000 men. The exhausted and demoralised soldiers, according to Gordon-Smith, refused to attack any more. On 30 September the Serbs stormed the summit again, and this time held it for good. The Bulgarians fled, abandoning their guns. Gordon-Smith writes of five guns, other sources of seven.

Serbian losses are given variously. The American historian Richard C. Hall, following Serbian studies, cites 4,643 killed, wounded and missing in the fighting for Kaymakchalan, most of them from the Drina Division. Gordon-Smith wrote that by 23 September, before the last Bulgarian attack, the whole offensive had cost the Serbs 10,000 killed and wounded.

Homecoming

For the Serbs, who since the autumn of 1915 had passed through Albania, Corfu and camps in Greece, the capture of the summit was of immense significance. Standing on the frontier, they set foot on Serbian soil for the first time in a year. The loss of the mountain, together with the Serbs’ advance onto the Starkov Grob ridge and French pressure north of Florina, forced the Bulgarians into another retreat. On the night of 2/3 October they fell back to a fortified line on the Crna covering Bitola.

After the war a chapel dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul was built on the summit of Kaymakchalan, completed in 1928 according to the English Wikipedia, and the bones of fallen Serbian soldiers were laid beside it. The Swiss criminologist Archibald Reiss, who went through the whole war with the Serbian army, asked that his heart should rest on Kaymakchalan. After his death in 1929 it was placed in an urn in the chapel. According to Serbian sources, the urn was destroyed by the Bulgarians during the Second World War.