The Macedonian campaign

by Luigi Villari

Our losses in this engagement amounted to about 400 men; those of the enemy were probably equally numerous. The episode is interesting inasmuch as this was the first time in which Italian troops were engaged in a hand-to-hand encounter with the Germans, and the 74 prisoners captured by our men were all Germans, belonging to the 9th and 10th Jäger Battalions, and to the 205th Company of Engineers. All our detachments which took part in the action behaved admirably. If the attack did not succeed in driving the enemy from the crest of Hill 1050, it served to prove that that position could not be taken by a frontal attack unless the Piton Rocheux on the right had been first captured, because it was the batteries behind the latter that dominated Hill 1050, so that even though the latter had been captured, the troops who occupied it would have been exposed to the enfilading fire of the said batteries. The Piton Rocheux was the chief protection of the enemy artillery, which could not be identified nor silenced on account of the deep gullies with steep sides in which they were hidden, and also because of the insufficiency of our air force. If the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies had learnt the lesson from this episode he would have avoided the failure and heavy losses which he suffered in subsequent attacks, but General Sarrail does not appear to have known exactly how this action had taken place nor its result. At least that is what we must conclude from what he writes in his memoirs,[22] in which he says that we had lost Hill 1050 on February 12th, and that in the operations of February 28th we had not been able to recapture it, though losing 400 men. In fact, he says “malgré, parait-il, 400 hommes hors de combat,” as though he doubted that we had had such losses. It is easy to see how many inaccuracies, not to use a cruder expression, this statement contains. We did not lose Hill 1050 on the 12th of February for the good reason that we had never occupied it. It was, as we have seen, the Serbs who had lost it some months before, immediately after capturing it; of the trenches which we had actually lost on February 12th we recaptured nearly all, partly in the attack on February 13th, and the others in that on the 27th. There only remained the very small bit which I have mentioned, and even the enemy could not hold this permanently.

These operations, and others on other sectors of the front, were only a prelude to a wider action which General Sarrail intended to conduct in the spring in order to try to break through the enemy line. As regards our own sector, General Petitti had proposed a very promising and well thought out plan of operations. The enemy positions on Hill 1050 were to be outflanked and only a demonstrative frontal action was to be developed against them, whereas the line was to be broken at the salient of Vlaklar, and the Piton Rocheux occupied in order to destroy the artillery behind it. But in the month of March our sector of front was shortened and part of the positions on the Piton Rocheux were given over to the French, so that this area remained divided between the Italians and the French.

The first phase of the offensive, according to Sarrail’s plan, was to consist of a flanking movement with the object of breaking the enemy line between the Lakes of Ochrida and Presba; Allied forces were then to march round the latter, occupy Resna, and thence threaten the enemy’s communications behind the Monastir front. At the same time a frontal attack from Monastir was to be delivered against Hill 1248 so as to give the town, which was always under enemy fire, a wider breathing space. On March 11th, the operations between the two lakes began with an attack by the 76th French Division. Important preparations had been made for transport along the difficult Pisoderi road between Florina and Koritza, but the enemy’s resistance proved more vigorous than was expected, and this fact, together with the extremely bad weather which set in just then, caused the flanking movement to fail, and it was soon abandoned. On the 13th a small operation was carried out by detachments of the 63rd Italian Infantry Regiment on Hill 1050 and certain enemy trenches, which formed a troublesome salient within our lines, were captured. The French attack on Hill 1248, which was to have been delivered at the same time, did not commence until the 14th. After an intense bombardment, the French attacked the Tzrvena-Stena west of Monastir, and captured some strong entrenchments; others were captured on Hill 1248. On the 18th, after other lively engagements, the French captured the whole of Hill 1248 as well as the fortified village of Krklina, taking 1,200 prisoners. But the enemy succeeded, by a counter-attack, in recapturing part of Hill 1248, whose summit remained abandoned by both sides. Monastir was somewhat relieved, but the town continued to remain under fire until the Armistice, and more than half of it was destroyed. It cannot be said that the bombardment was unjustified because, besides various Commands, the French had placed a number of batteries there.

HELIOGRAPH IN A CAVERN ON HILL 1050.

ROCK-PERFORATING MACHINE ON HILL 1050.

To face p. 126.

On March 25th, the enemy again attacked the positions of the 63rd Infantry Regiment on Hill 1050, but were repulsed. After another quiet period the offensive was to be resumed in April, and this time the British were to deliver the attack. General Sarrail wanted them to advance simultaneously on Serres and Doiran, but General Milne replied that with his weak effectives he could not attempt an offensive on both sectors, and he decided to limit himself to the Doiran front. He probably realized that General Sarrail wanted him to attack Serres solely for political reasons, because Serres, being a place which even the ordinary public had heard of, its capture would have been a good advertisement for the Armée d’Orient, but if the capture of the town appeared fairly easy, it would have been very difficult to hold it, as it was dominated by formidable Bulgarian positions on the hills behind it.

On April 25th the British attack was launched. The immediate objective was the capture of the Grand and Petit Couronné, extremely strong positions defending the passage between Lake Doiran and the Vardar. Their capture would have opened two roads, that of the Vardar Valley with the railway along the river, and that of the Kosturino Pass towards Strumitza and the interior of Bulgaria. This sector of the front was, like that of the Cerna loop and that of Hill 1248, similar to the fronts of Italy and France, inasmuch as it was provided with all the defensive systems known to modern warfare, and the lines of the two adversaries were very close together, but it differed from the European fronts as all the sectors of Macedonia differed from them, owing to the far greater difficulties of supply and communications. Between Lake Doiran and the Vardar the 22nd and 26th Divisions were distributed (XII Corps), and they had held that sector for almost a year. The ground was extremely broken, and if the mountains occupied by the enemy were not very high, they dominated the British positions and were very well adapted for a strenuous defence. The most conspicuous point of the British position was a long hill like a hump, which the French had named La Tortue, on account of its resemblance to the back of a tortoise. The British trenches lay along the ridge on La Tortue, beside which rose the Petit Couronné of about the same height, which was the principal bastion of the first line defences of the Bulgarians. Between the two heights there was a deep gully, known as the Ravin des Jumeaux. Behind La Tortue were other hills, all dominated by the two formidable positions of the Grand Couronné near the lake, and the P ridges, the former 600 m. above the sea, and the highest point of the latter (P 2), 700 m.