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Bulgarian machine-gunners laying out ammunition belts on the Salonica Front.
Bulgarian Soldiers, many of them wounded, on the Salonica Front. Bandages on hands, arms, heads, eye, a number with canes, one with crutches.
Map of the Western Front in early September 1918 showing the American divisions in position in the American Sector. The Americans reduced the St. Mihiel sector in an offensive beginning on September 12. The dotted line shows the limit of the German advance from March to July prior to the Allied offensives that had retaken all their gains. From The History of The A.E.F. by Shipley Thomas.
Northern Palestine from Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus by Karl Baedeker
Map of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian advance into Serbia in October and November, 1915, with the Central Power offensive along the Greek border in August 1916 and the Allied counteroffensive the following month. Map from the Reichsarchiv Herbstschlacht in Macedonien (Autumn battle in Macedonia).
"Todorov, it is interesting to note, had no experience of the Doiran front. . . . Nerezov, on the other hand, had spent two years building up the defenses of Doiran . . .A Bulgarian writer describes how the First Army, in the clear moonlight, was preparing to meet renewed British attacks and even, perhaps, to go over to the offensive. Now, before dawn on September 20, the operational order for a retreat went out from Nerezov's headquarters at Dedeli: the First Army must fall back to cover the withdrawal of the 3rd Division on its right. In a stunned silence the divisional commanders returned to their advanced positions. It had been a bitter blow for them, but they felt there was one small crumb of consolation: they, at any rate, were not retreating under pressure from their adversaries." ((1), more)
"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." ((2), more)
"I definitely fixed the time schedule for the general offensive from the Meuse to the North Sea:September 26th—A Franco-American attack between the Suippe and the Meuse.September 27th—An attack by the British First and Third armies in the general direction of Cambrai.September 28th—An attack by the Flanders Group of Armies between the sea and the Lys, under the command of the King of the Belgians.September 29th—An attack by the British Fourth Army, supported by the French First Army, in the direction of Busigny." ((3), more)
"It should be stated, however, that from the 20th to the 22d [of September, 1918], none of the orders from the Army Group, forwarded through the Fourth Army, had reached the Eighth Army and that the leader of the Eighth Army therefore did not attach to the Tiberias front the extreme importance for the general situation that the Army Group did. . . .On the early morning of September 23d, the Asia Corps effected the crossing of the Jordan without much loss. The staffs of the 16th and 19th Divisions however were captured on the west bank by British cavalry. Turkish soldiers went over to the enemy in crowds as soon as fired upon, or bombarded by British fliers. Most of them had thrown away their arms. It was another consequence of the fatal order of headquarters of the Eighth Army." ((4), more)
"Next morning the brigade resumed their march into the hills toward the Babuna Pass. More than twenty miles northeast of them the 17th Colonial Division of General Pruneau and the Yugoslav Division were also moving toward Skopje up the Vardar River, and that same day (September 24) they succeeded in entering the vital town of Gradsko. . . . 'the most important center of all communications in the Macedonian theater of war.'As the armies wavered in the face of the Allied offensive and the onslaught from the air turned the retreat into a rout, the latent unrest in the country broke into open acts of defiance. On September 23 and 24 left-wing Socialists organized soviets in Pechaev, Berovo, and Tsarevo Selo." ((5), more)
(1) 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.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, pp. 214–215, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(2) 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.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 215, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(3) Allied Commander-in Chief Ferdinand Foch's summary of his planned offensives at the end of September, 1918. The Meuse River flows east of Verdun. The Franco-American attack of the 26th would be the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The British offensive of the First Battle of Cambrai in November, 1917 had demonstrated how successful tanks could be. Foch and Albert, King of the Belgians, had agreed on the creation of the Flanders Army Group on September 9. It included the Belgian Army, the British Second Army, and the French 7th Army Corps and 2nd Cavalry Corps under the command of Albert. In his Pyrrhic Victory, Robert Doughty dates Foch's decision as September 23. In his Memoirs Foch writes only that he determined the schedule after a tour of inspection from September 19 to 22.
The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott by Ferdinand Foch, page 408, copyright © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., publication date: 1931
(4) On September 19, 1918 British General Edmund Allenby attacked Turkish forces in Palestine, advancing along the Mediterranean coast rather than inland where Arab forces working with T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — had staged raids on Daraa, the Hejaz Railroad, and communications. Djevad Pasha, Commander of the Turkish Eighth Army, took the feint for the offensive and gave 'the fatal order' for his forces to cross to the east bank of the Jordan River, away, that is, from a position where it could have supported the Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies' retreat before the British offensive. The Arabs and Royal Air Force continued strikes on communications infrastructure, isolating Turkish commanders.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, pp. 291 and 292, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(5) 'The brigade' that 'resumed their march' on September 24, 1918 was a French Moroccan one of the 1st and 4th Chausseur d'Afrique working its way through the mountains west of the Allied advance up the Vardar River valley on the Balkan Front. To the east, what had been intended to be an orderly retreat before the advancing British had turned into a rout when the Royal Air Force strafed and bombed the defenceless Bulgarian First Army moving north through mountain passes. As the Allies continued advancing into occupied Serbia, the Bulgarian home front threatened imminent collapse. The embedded quotation in the first paragraph is by German Commander Paul von Hindenburg.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, pp. 219 and 225, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
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