Voivoda(Marshall) Radomir Putnik, commander of the Serbian Army, defeated Austria-Hungary's three invasions of 1914. © 1919 by the New York Times Company
Gen. Radomir PutnikCommander in Chief of the Serbian Armies, who inflicted crushing defeats on Austria.
"In November [1914] the [Austro-Hungarian] enemy launched their third and greatest invasion [of Serbia]. General Potiorek, at the head of five army corps and two supplementary divisions, resumed the attack from the northwest. The situation was again critical. The Serbian troops were in the marshy plains between the Drina and the Save. The roads on which they depended for supplies had been broken up and rendered almost impassable by three months of war. The supply of ammunition was steadily dwindling. A withdrawal of the whole line was clearly necessary, despite the depressing effect of such strategy upon the army and the civil population. It was necessary to give the Austro-Hungarians a taste of the difficulties of the country. 'All my strategy,' said Voivoda Putnik in reference to this campaign, 'consisted in placing between the enemy's fighting line and their impedimenta the Serbian national mud.'"
Excerpt from an account of Austria-Hungary's third invasion of Serbia in 1914 by Robert Laffan, a British religious worker in Serbia who became a chaplain in the Serbian Army. General Potiorek commanded all three invasions, launching the third on November 6, 1914. He had also played, poorly, host to Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarejevo when he was assassinated. All the warring nations were low on ammunition. Her allies, Britain, France, and Russia, had no means to supply landlocked Serbia and had little to spare. Marshall ('Voivoda') Putnik commanded Serbia's army. Laffan published The Guardians of the Gate : Historical Lectures on the Serbs in 1917, the ultimate source of the above.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. II, 1914, p. 419, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
Radomir Putnik, Putnik, Serbia, 1914, November, 1914-11-06
