German pencil sketch dated April 14, 1916, of the Vardar River valley in Macedonia. Mount Dudica is on the current (2018) border between Macedonia and Greece.
von den Berg der Stellung Höhe 591 M.VardartalDudica 2180 M.Dcena 2091 M.From the mountain of the position height 591 M.Vardar valleyDudica 2180 M.Dcena 2091 M.
"It did not take the Voivode long to make up his mind. A signal was dispatched to every unit between the Vardar and Monastir—Mettez en route quatorze officiers et huit soldats—and each battery commander knew that on September 14 at 8 A.M. he was to open fire. There were barely two hours to wait.The machinery of the great offensive was put in motion. Over five hundred guns poured their shells into the enemy defenses along eighty miles of front. By the standards of Verdun it was nothing, but it was without precedent in the Balkans. And as the gunners had their day, 36,000 French and Serbian and Italian infantrymen had their rifles ready. Behind them were eighteen squadrons of cavalry. The Bulgars and the Germans caught unprepared in this sector were outnumbered three to one. Just one more dawn and all the seventy-five Allied battalions would be moving forward. Just forty-eight more dawns and the Serbs would re-enter their capital city."
French General Louis Franchet d'Esperey commanded Allied forces — French, British, Italian, Greek, and Serbian — on the Balkan Front, but the plan for an offensive through the mountains between Greece and Serbia, and the detemination that weather conditions were right to execute it, belonged to Serbian Voivode (Field Marshal) Zivojin Mišić. The Bulgarians and their German allies had kept an Allied army penned in and languishing in the region for two years, and were unprepared for the assault when Mišić started up his fourteen officers and eight soldiers. The Vardar River valley was the most obvious route for an Allied invasion, and was heavily defended. Monastir was a Serbian town on the Greek border that had been taken by French, Serbian, and Russian troops on November 19, 1916.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, pp. 199–200, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
1918-09-14, 1918, September, Voivode Mišić, Misic, Monastir, Vardar, Vardar River Valley,
