Start of the March offensive in Macedonia

On 11 March 1917, after a heavy artillery preparation, the French 76th Infantry Division attacked the positions of the Central Powers on the isthmus between Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa, on the borderland of Macedonia and Albania. This is how the Italian historian Luigi Villari, the British war correspondent George Ward Price and French accounts date the start of the fighting. The Austrian official history gives 12 March, and the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in the Balkans, General Maurice Sarrail, wrote in his memoirs that on 12 March operations were already under way.

The attack was the first step of a plan intended to push the Bulgarians and Germans back from Bitola. The Allies had taken the town in November 1916, but the enemy had halted only a few kilometres beyond it, and his artillery on the mountains to the west and on Hill 1248 to the north shelled the streets every day. Sarrail was preparing a great offensive for the spring, and before that, on the advice of the commander of the French Armée d’Orient, General Paul Grossetti, he wanted to “gain a little breathing space” around Bitola. General de Vassart’s 76th Division was to break through the front between the lakes, wheel east and come out onto the plain near Resen, in the rear of the positions covering Bitola. Five squadrons of cavalry stood ready to dash, once the breakthrough was made, to the bridge south of the town. If this succeeded, further divisions were to attack the Baba range west of Bitola and Hill 1248.

The isthmus was defended by a small mixed detachment under the German Colonel Thierry: a Bulgarian cavalry brigade, an Austro-Hungarian Landsturm battalion and two Austro-Hungarian mountain batteries, as well as German Jäger from Saxony. Preparations on the French side were very difficult. All supplies went by a single wretched road from Florina round the southern end of Prespa, over the Pisoderi pass, where lorries gave way to pack animals. Ward Price called it the greatest climb he had seen in the whole area of Allied operations.

The first days brought no success. On 13 March Sarrail reported that because of the terrain and the snow progress was very slow, although two machine guns and 22 Saxon Jäger had fallen into French hands. He had himself gone to the front on 12 March and had to intervene personally to get the division to bring its artillery into action. He later wrote bitterly that de Vassart, contrary to his instructions, had only sketched out the outflanking manoeuvre and had fed the infantry into battle “drop by drop”. The enemy gained time to bring up reinforcements, and soon afterwards a blizzard broke out in the mountains, which Ward Price considered one of the worst of that winter.

The attack between the lakes never recovered from this, and on 19 March Sarrail ordered it to be broken off. Things went better north of Bitola, where in the following days the 57th Division took Hill 1248.