The Macedonian campaign

by Luigi Villari

To the north-east of the lake the Cretan Division and troops of the 28th Division had advanced across the plain between the lake and the Beles range, and at dawn attacked the enemy positions; the outpost lines were carried, and the main lines penetrated at two points, but the ground gained could not be maintained, and General Milne authorized the force to fall back on the railway.

In order to assist the progress of the Serbs and to prevent the enemy on the Doiran front from sending reserves against them, it was decided to renew the attack the next day. General Wilson’s force had been strengthened by the 14th Greek Division sent up from the training camp at Naresh to relieve the Serres Division, which had suffered heavily.

On the 19th, at five o’clock, after an all-night bombardment, Scottish and Greek troops again attacked the Bulgarian positions on the lower slopes of the Grand Couronné, and captured a good deal of ground, in spite of the desperate resistance and heavy machine-gun fire of the enemy. But the 65th Brigade, which had come up from an influenza observation camp in the night to relieve the 66th, failed in its gallant attack on the P ridge. The troops at the centre and on the right thus found their left exposed, and were forced to fall back, and part of the ground gained on the previous day had also to be abandoned. The retreat was covered by the 12th Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the 8th Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the 11th Scottish Rifles, who suffered severe casualties, including all their Commanding Officers killed or wounded. By midday General Milne decided to consolidate the ground won, which included the Petit Couronné, the Téton Hill, and Doiran town; but the P ridge and the Grand Couronné still held out.

The total losses of the British had been about 3,900, and of the Greeks 2,300. The Bulgarians, too, had lost heavily—some 4,600 men, including 1,200 prisoners. It was impossible to renew the attack owing to the greatly reduced strength of the British, whose battalions, even before the attack, were only about 400 men each, and now the slopes of the Grand Couronné and the P ridges were covered with British dead. Although the Bulgarians had been almost without food for four days as the British barrage had prevented the arrival of supplies, they still occupied their terrible positions, and the whole thing seemed a useless tragedy in spite of the great heroism shown. “Rather than miss the opportunity for which they had waited three years, officers and men remained in the ranks till often they dropped from sheer exhaustion,” wrote General Milne in his report—but nothing had been gained. The real objective, however, had been achieved: not a single Bulgarian soldier had been able to leave this sector to help in resisting the Serbian advance.

It was at this moment that the defeat of the enemy began to take shape. A great part of the Vardar-Cerna triangle was lost, the few troops remaining between Demir Kapu and Ghevgheli had now to fall back beyond the Vardar in a north-easterly direction, and this fact constituted a menace even for the troops round Lake Doiran, to whom no other line of supply was left but the Doiran-Kosturino-Strumitza road. On the 21st signs that a retreat was beginning were noted on the British front. Everywhere depots were observed to be in flames, and munitions dumps exploding. General Milne, with his XII Corps strengthened by the 14th Greek Division, renewed the offensive. The 9th Bulgarian Division having offered but slight resistance, the formidable defences collapsed without much effort, and the whole II Bulgarian Army fell back, seeking safety over the narrow Kosturino Pass. While the British infantry and cavalry pursued them, flights of aeroplanes, flying only a few metres from the ground, bombarded the Bulgarians and shot down men with machine guns along the Strumitza road, encumbered with vehicles, artillery, etc., by now in indescribable disorder. The spectacle offered by that road was one of appalling confusion and terror. From all sides fires broke out; guns were abandoned in gullies, rifles, equipment, baggage were thrown away, and the demoralized army fled towards its homeland.

On the 21st the A.F.O. came into action. The enemy troops on this sector were less threatened than on the other sectors, because, if they had lost the Prilep-Gradsko road, they still retained that over the Babuna Pass between Prilep and Veles, which could be easily defended, and the Kichevo-Kalkandelen road. But they were now threatened in another quarter. Day by day the communications between the XI German Army and Bulgaria were becoming more difficult, and it could be foreseen that at any moment they might be cut altogether, and then that Army would have had no other alternative but to retreat across Albania to reach the Herzegovina and Dalmatia. It was the fate of the Serbian Army in 1915 which seemed about to be repeated. On that day detachments of the 11th Colonial Division (General Farret) and the 3rd Greek Division (General Tricoupis) crossed the Cerna (east) between Selo-Monastir and Cebren, and advanced in the direction of Prilep. General Henrys, commanding the A.F.O., now ordered the advance of his whole army, beginning with an attack launched by the Italian Expeditionary Force.

The duties assigned to the latter were: 1st, to carry out, during the Franco-Serbian offensive, an intensive demonstrative action, to prevent the enemy in front of it from withdrawing troops to reinforce the centre (a duty similar to that of the British); 2nd, the Franco-Serbian attack having been launched, the I.E.F. was to continue to act demonstratively and to resist any counter-attack which might be attempted by the enemy, in fact, to provoke such counter-attacks so as to make the enemy believe that we ourselves intended to attack immediately, and to make of our sector the pivot of an enveloping movement on the part of the Serbs; 3rd, as soon as this movement had produced its effect on the right flank of the 302nd German Division (the one opposite to us) and on the lines of communication in the Cerna loop, to attack and pursue the enemy in the direction of Prilep, their chief centre of supplies west of the Vardar and headquarters of the XI German Army.

The first and second of these tasks were carried out in the period from the 14th to the 21st of September, and the Italian troops nailed down the enemy on its front by means of bombardments and repeated local attacks of so fierce a character as not only to prevent them from sending any help against the Franco-Serbs, but to make them believe that the attack in the centre was to be followed immediately by one on our area. In order to forestall this supposed intention, they attacked vigorously, so much so, that the object desired by the Commander in-Chief was more than achieved, but at the cost of heavy losses on our side. Our defences were seriously wrecked by the German and Bulgarian artillery, but the Italian infantry resisted admirably under this terrific fire, and the enemy attacks were all repulsed. On September 22nd the threat of an enveloping movement in the direction of the Cerna (east) began to be perceived by the enemy, and General Mombelli ordered the attack. At 17.30 hours our infantry sprang out of the trenches, where they had been held down for two years, unable to advance a step; an hour later they were beyond the enemy’s first lines, and the whole mighty defensive system collapsed. The terrible Hill 1050, which had been so powerfully fortified, which we had studied with such minute care and attention as though it were a zone of great archæological interest, and whose crest we had never been able to hold, was finally in our hands. Those cruel eyes of the enemy’s observation posts on the topmost ridge, whose pitiless glance had inflicted death or wounds to so many gallant soldiers, were now closed for ever.

The defences proved even stronger than we had suspected. Immense caverns there were, cut out of the solid rock on the northern slopes of the hill, which our shells had never been able to reach, illuminated by electricity and supplied with special appliances, by means of which the various detachments were warned of every different kind of bombardment, so that each man knew at once where to take refuge—nothing, in fact, had been neglected to make of this mountain an impregnable fortress.

In this first attack we took few prisoners, about 150, because the broken nature of the ground enabled the bulk of the enemy forces to escape us, as had happened to the Franco-Serbians for the same reasons on the first days. The Lucca Light Cavalry and the detachments of machine gunners on motor lorries, which General Mombelli had kept ready near the front, dashed forward in pursuit of the enemy and had some heavy engagements at Kanatlarci. The whole division then advanced. On the morning of the 22nd the battalions were 10 km. beyond the enemy lines, and were pursuing the Bulgarian rearguard. The Command also pushed forward its G.H.Q., and Tepavci was abandoned for good. In the Monastir-Prilep plain, behind Hill 1050, there were several heights on which the enemy might have made a stand, but as on the Serbian front, there were no second lines, except a few lines of insignificant wire entanglements and some isolated trenches. The Bulgarians offered a certain resistance on the heights of Cepik (Hill 664), Kalabak (Hill 1772), and Topolchani (Hill 603), on both sides of the Monastir-Prilep road, while our troops occupied the edge of these same heights. From that point the advance on Prilep would have been easy, but at 14 hours on the 23rd our Command received orders from the G.Q.G. to let Prilep be occupied by the 11th Colonial Division on our right, and to advance on Krushevo. The reason for this change of programme was to prevent the enemy troops in the Monastir area from retreating towards Kichevo, whence a road leads across the mountains to Gostivar and Kalkandelen, the terminus of the railway from Uskub. This task was really important, because its object was to prevent numerous Bulgarian regiments from reaching Uskub and to facilitate the action of the Franco-Serb offensive towards that very important railway and road junction, the only point through which the remains of the XI German Army could hope to rejoin the rest of the enemy troops. But it cannot be denied that this change of programme was a disappointment for our officers and men. Prilep was a well-known objective, and had been much talked about as it was the headquarters of the Army Command, and was provided with depots and shelters; it had to be occupied by someone, and its occupation by our troops would have been a slight moral and material satisfaction for the 35th Division such as it was not accustomed to. The matter was really of small importance, but it would have pleased us had it been known that that important centre had been first occupied by the Italians. The fact that French troops were sent there instead of ours was not, perhaps, due to any lack of consideration towards us on the part of the C.A.A., but it appeared in that light, all the more so as the same thing had happened when we were acting in liaison with the French in the Monastir operations, and it would have been better to avoid even the appearance of unfriendliness.