French pilot and officers in front of a Farman pusher biplane at an airfield in Salonica, Greece. Note the windscreen. Other planes and grounds crew can be seen in the background. The message on the reverse is dated February 28, 1917.
Salonique - Aéroplane FrançaisSalonica - French AeroplaneReverse:Message from Salonica, February 28, 1917Editeurs B. R. D.
"The capture of Pogradec proved remarkably easy. On September 7 [1917] General Jacquemot, with a scratch division of such units of the 156th and 57th Divisions as were not on leave, began his advance through the wooded hills. At three in the afternoon of September 10 the first French units entered Pogradec. By the time he gave orders to halt the advance on September 12, Jacquemot had taken 414 Austrians and Bulgarians prisoner and had captured a considerable quantity of material and munitions. The French lost 44 men killed and had 131 wounded."
French General Maurice Sarrail commanded an Allied Army of French, British, Serbian, Russian, and Italian units opposing a Bulgarian army supported by German troops on the Salonica Front extending across northern Greece and into Serbia. Sarrail's spring 1917 offensive began May 8 and ended with little to show for his loss of 14,000 men. For the Allies, the rest of the summer was bleak: The British withdrew troops to Egypt for an offensive in Palestine. After a show trial, Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as Apis, a colonel in the Serbian Army and leader of the Black Hand Society that had plotted the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand and supplied weapons to the assassins, was executed for plotting against the Serbian Government and attempting to assassinate Serbian Regent Alexander. In June, the French forced Greek King Constantine to abdicate. Some French and Russian units mirrored in a small way the mutinous activities of their fellow soldiers on Western and Russian Fronts. From August 18 to 20, a large part of the city of Salonica itself was destroyed in a fire. The victory at Pogradec was a small bright spot in the Allied summer.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 158, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
1917-09-07, 1917, September, Salonica, Pogradec
