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Bulgarian Soldiers, many of them wounded, on the Salonica Front. Bandages on hands, arms, heads, eye, a number with canes, one with crutches.

Bulgarian Soldiers, many of them wounded, on the Salonica Front. Bandages on hands, arms, heads, eye, a number with canes, one with crutches.

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Saturday, September 21, 1918

"It was the airmen who first let Milne know what was happening. Two De Havilland 9s of 47 Squadron, R.A.F., reconnoitered the Vardar and Strumica valleys on the morning of September 21. At 10:40 one of their observers noted: 'The defile west of Rabrovo on the Stumica-Rabrovo road was packed with transport, and round Rabrovo were anything up to 500 lorries and H[orse] T[ransport] wagons waiting to go up the road.' The significance of the report could not be missed: Rabrovo was two miles north of Nerezov's headquarters at Dedeli. And it was the same on every road leading back into Old Bulgaria. The enemy was in full flight. . . .

The long columns of lorries and horse-drawn vehicles moving slowly along the impossible roads were mercilessly bombed and machine-gunned by the R.A.F. Not a German plane was to be seen, and the Bulgarians themselves offered little resistance. . . . Todorov and his German allies had envisaged an 'orderly retreat.' They had no notion of the havoc created by air attacks on a slow-moving column caught in the confines of a rocky valley. An army ceased to exist."

Quotation Context

On September 15, 1918 French General Franchet d'Esperey, commander of Allied forces — French, Italian, Greek, Serbian, and British — on the Balkan Front, opened a successful offensive through the mountains between Greece and Serbia. The British, with Greek support, held the sector around Lake Doiran to the east of the initial advance and opened their phase of the offensive on September 18 against Bulgarians who had held and strengthened their position for two years. The British offensive, like their previous assaults at Lake Doiran, was failing when the Bulgarians retreated. General Georgi Todorov, who had replaced the ailing Nicola Zhekov as Commander-in-Chief of the Bulgarian Army ten days earlier, agreed with the Germans that the Allies' supply problems would only increase as they advanced, and that the best action was an orderly retreat. General Stefan Nerezov was commander of the Bulgarian First Army holding the Lake Doiran sector.

Source

The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 215, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965

Tags

1918-09-21, 1918, September, Todorov, retreat, Bulgaria, Bulgarians, bombing, strafing, wounded Bulgarian soldiers