Macedonian Front

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The Macedonian Front, also known as the Salonica Front, was a military theater of the First World War formed in the autumn of 1915 when the Allied Powers landed troops at Salonica, now Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, in an attempt to aid Serbia.

The front ran from the Albanian Adriatic coast through northern Greece to the Struma River on the Aegean Sea, pitting a multinational Allied force, the Army of the Orient, against the Bulgarian army, bolstered at different times by smaller German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman units.

The Macedonian Front began on 21 October 1915 and ended with the Armistice of Salonica, signed on 29 September 1918, with the ceasefire coming into effect at noon on 30 September 1918. For most of its three years the Macedonian Front was a stalemate, a long entrenched line in difficult mountain country, where disease killed more men than combat and where offensives in 1916 and 1917 failed to break through.

Its critics called it a sideshow, and the troops who served there joked that they were the gardeners of Salonica, digging trenches and waiting while the decisive battles were fought elsewhere. Yet in September 1918 the Macedonian Front produced one of the decisive breakthroughs of the war.

The Vardar offensive, launched on 15 September 1918, broke the Bulgarian line at Dobro Pole, forced Bulgaria to seek an armistice, and opened the way for the liberation of Serbia and the collapse of the Central Powers in the Balkans.

Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to leave the war, and its surrender, followed within weeks by the surrenders of the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary and Germany, helped to bring the First World War to an end. The Macedonian Front therefore matters not because it was the largest front of the war, but because it was the front where the Central Powers first broke, and because its long stalemate and sudden collapse illustrate how a secondary theater can become decisive when the enemy is exhausted.

Key Facts

Item	Detail
Dates	21 October 1915 – 29 September 1918 (Armistice of Salonica signed 29 September; ceasefire in effect at noon on 30 September 1918)
Theater/Location	Macedonia, in northern Greece and southern Serbia, from the Albanian Adriatic coast to the Struma River; the Allied base was Salonica, now Thessaloniki
Result	Allied victory; Armistice of Salonica, Bulgaria left the war, Serbia was liberated, and the Balkan theater of the First World War ended
Commanders	Allied: General Maurice Sarrail, General Adolphe Guillaumat, General Louis Franchet d’Esperey, Lieutenant General George Milne, General Petar Bojovic, General Zivojin Misic. Central Powers: General Nikola Zhekov, General Georgi Todorov, Field Marshal August von Mackensen
Strength	Allied forces grew to several hundred thousand men at their peak, including French, British, Serbian, Greek, Italian and Russian troops. Bulgarian forces, with German and Austro-Hungarian support, numbered in the hundreds of thousands at their peak
Losses	Losses were very heavy and estimates vary widely by source and by definition. Allied casualties over the whole front are estimated in the hundreds of thousands, including very large numbers lost to disease, above all malaria. Bulgarian and Central Powers losses are also estimated in the hundreds of thousands. In the final Vardar offensive, Allied casualties totalled about 17,295, and about 77,000 Bulgarian and German prisoners were taken

Background

The Fall of Serbia and the Landing at Salonica

The Macedonian Front was created by the fall of Serbia. Serbia had resisted Austro-Hungarian attacks in 1914, but in October 1915 a combined offensive by Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria overwhelmed the Serbian army. The Austro-Hungarian Balkan Army and the German Eleventh Army under Field Marshal August von Mackensen attacked from the north, crossing the Sava and Danube rivers and occupying Belgrade, while two Bulgarian armies attacked from the east on 15 October 1915, occupying Kumanovo, Stip and Skopje and cutting the Serbian retreat to the Greek border.

The Serbian army, with the king and government, retreated through the mountains of Montenegro and Albania in the winter of 1915 and 1916, losing more than 200,000 men in the snow, before being evacuated by sea to Corfu and then to Salonica.

France and Britain, who had been fighting at Gallipoli, decided to land troops at Salonica to aid Serbia, but the expedition came too late and with too little force to prevent the fall of Serbia. French forces and Lieutenant General Sir Bryan Mahon’s 10th Division, exhausted after service at Gallipoli, began landing at Salonica on 5 October 1915.

The landing was complicated by the political crisis in Greece, known as the National Schism, in which King Constantine favoured neutrality and the Central Powers, while Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos favoured the Allies. Greek neutrality meant that the Allies could not at first advance freely into Greek territory, and the landing force had to entrench around Salonica in a fortified camp that was soon nicknamed the Birdcage.

The National Schism in Greece

The political background of the Macedonian Front was as important as its military background. Greece in 1915 was divided between the king, who was married to the sister of the German Kaiser and who favoured neutrality, and Venizelos, who wanted Greece to join the Allies.

The Allies landed at Salonica without clear Greek consent, and the Greek government protested, but the landing went ahead because the Allies needed a base from which to aid Serbia and to threaten Bulgaria. The division deepened over the next two years. Venizelos set up a rival government at Salonica in 1916, with Allied support, while the king remained in Athens.

In June 1917, after Allied pressure and a blockade, Constantine left Greece, Venizelos gained full control of the country, and Greece declared war on the Central Powers and joined the Allied Army of the Orient. The Greek army then fought on the Macedonian Front, above all in 1918, when Greek divisions played a major part in the Vardar offensive.

The National Schism left a lasting bitterness in Greek politics, and it meant that for the first two years of the Macedonian Front the Allies were fighting from a base in a country that was formally neutral and internally divided, a complication that no other front of the First World War faced in quite the same way.

The Stabilisation of the Front

By the spring of 1916 the Macedonian Front had stabilised into a long entrenched line running from the Albanian coast through the mountains of northern Greece to the Gulf of Orfano on the Aegean Sea. The Allied force, the Army of the Orient, was under French command, with French, Serbian, Russian and Italian forces holding the western part of the line and British forces holding the area east of the Vardar River, the trenches west of Lake Doiran, and the Struma Valley to the east.

The Bulgarian army held the high ground to the north, with strong positions in the mountains, and it was supported by German artillery and staff officers and, at times, by Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman units. Neither side was strong enough to break through. The Allies were short of men, transport and artillery, and the terrain favoured the defence.

The Bulgarians, for their part, had no wish to attack Salonica, which was heavily fortified, and they were content to hold their line and to tie down Allied troops who might otherwise have been used on the Eastern Front (World War I) or the Italian Front (World War I).

The front therefore settled into a long period of trench warfare, raids, artillery duels and local attacks, broken by larger offensives in 1916, 1917 and 1918, none of which, until September 1918, achieved a decisive breakthrough.

Opposing Forces

The Allied Army of the Orient

The Allied Army of the Orient was one of the most multinational forces of the First World War. At its peak it included French, British, Serbian, Greek, Italian and Russian troops, with smaller contingents from other Allied states. The French provided the commander-in-chief for most of the war and the largest single contingent in the western sector.

The British Salonika Force, under Lieutenant General George Milne, eventually numbered more than 200,000 soldiers at its peak, and it held the eastern sector around Lake Doiran and the Struma Valley. The Serbian army, rebuilt after its retreat through Albania, returned to the front in 1916 and fought with particular determination, because it was fighting to liberate its own country.

The Greek army, after Greece joined the Allies in June 1917, added several divisions, and Greek troops fought in the final offensive of 1918. The Italian and Russian contingents were smaller but they held important sectors of the line. The diversity of the Allied force was a strength, because it brought together troops with different skills and experience, but it was also a weakness, because the different national contingents had different languages, different supply systems and different political priorities, and coordination between them was often difficult.

The French command had to manage all of those differences while also dealing with the Greek political crisis and with the demands of the Western Front, which always had first call on men and supplies.

The Bulgarian Army and Its Allies

The Bulgarian army was the main enemy on the Macedonian Front, and it was a formidable opponent. Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers in October 1915, in return for the promise of territorial gains in Macedonia, and its army was well trained, well led and fighting on ground it knew well.

Bulgarian troops held strong mountain positions, with good artillery support, and they had the advantage of interior lines and shorter supply routes. They were supported by German officers, artillery and, at times, German infantry, and by Austro-Hungarian units on the western part of the front. The Bulgarian commander-in-chief, General Nikola Zhekov, and his subordinate commanders, including General Georgi Todorov, directed the defence for most of the war.

Bulgaria’s weakness was not military but political and economic. By 1918 Bulgaria was exhausted by three years of war, its soldiers were poorly fed and clothed, its home front was suffering from shortages and war weariness, and its allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, were themselves facing defeat on other fronts and could send little help.

The Bulgarian army that broke in September 1918 was not beaten by numbers alone; it was beaten by a combination of Allied pressure, its own exhaustion, and the collapse of morale at home, which led to the Radomir Rebellion, a soldiers’ revolt that forced the Bulgarian government to seek an armistice.

Disease, Terrain and Supply

The Macedonian Front was fought in difficult terrain and under difficult conditions. The front line ran through mountains, with peaks of several thousand feet, deep valleys and few roads. Supply was a constant problem, above all for the British in the Struma Valley, where the summer heat and the prevalence of malaria made the valley almost uninhabitable.

Both sides evacuated the Struma Valley in the summer because of disease, and malaria alone caused about 160,000 British casualties during the campaign, a figure that shows how disease could be as destructive as combat. Other diseases, including dysentery, typhus and influenza, also caused heavy losses.

The terrain favoured the defence, because attackers had to climb steep slopes under fire, and it made it difficult to move artillery and supplies forward after a breakthrough. The Allies built roads, railways and light railways behind the front, and Salonica became a large base with hospitals, depots and workshops, but the front remained a difficult place to fight.

The men who served there remembered the heat, the dust, the mosquitoes, the mud of winter, and the long periods of inactivity broken by sudden, costly attacks on mountain positions that seemed impossible to take.

The Macedonian Front, 1915–1918

The First Battles, 1915–1916

The first fighting on the Macedonian Front was a rearguard action. In November 1915 the Allied forces that had landed at Salonica tried to advance north to help the retreating Serbians, but they were too late and too weak. The British 10th Division went into the line in the mountains around Kosturino in November, and on 6 December the Bulgarians attacked after a heavy bombardment in the Battle of Kosturino.

The Allies were forced to retreat to Salonica, and the front stabilised around the fortified camp. In 1916 the Allies, once reinforced, were able to advance north and west, and they established the front line that would hold for the next two years.

In August 1916 Bulgaria invaded Greece in the Struma operation, easily occupying all Greek territory east of the Struma, because the Greek army had been ordered not to resist by King Constantine. The Allies responded with the Monastir offensive in the autumn of 1916, in which French, Serbian, Russian and Italian forces in the west captured Monastir in Serbia on 19 November 1916, the first major Allied success on the front and the first Serbian town to be liberated.

The offensive did not break through to the north, but it showed that the Allies could attack, and it gave the Serbian army a foothold in its own country. The British, in the east, held their line around Doiran and the Struma, and they learned, at high cost, that the Bulgarian positions in the mountains were very hard to take by frontal assault.

The Stalemate, 1917

The year 1917 was a year of stalemate on the Macedonian Front. In the spring of 1917 the Allies launched a general offensive, with the French and Serbians attacking in the west and the British attacking around Doiran in the east.

In April 1917 the British 22nd, 26th and 60th Divisions attacked the defences around Doiran and on the Vardar as a diversion from the main Franco-Serbian offensive to the west. They were repulsed, and the main attack also failed. The front line thereafter remained more or less static for the rest of the year.

The reasons for the failure were familiar: the Bulgarian positions were strong, the terrain favoured the defence, Allied artillery was insufficient for the task, and coordination between the different national contingents was difficult. The year was also marked by political change. In June 1917 Greece joined the Allies, which strengthened the Allied force, but it also added a new contingent that needed to be trained and equipped.

The Russian Revolution in 1917 weakened the Russian contingent on the front, and Russian troops were eventually withdrawn. The British Salonika Force, at its peak more than 200,000 strong, spent much of the year in the Struma Valley, where malaria caused heavy losses, and in the trenches around Doiran, where the summer heat and the winter cold were equally trying.

The stalemate of 1917 led many in London and Paris to question whether the Macedonian Front was worth the men and supplies it consumed, and there were proposals to withdraw the force altogether. The front survived because the French, who commanded it, argued that it tied down Bulgarian and German troops, protected the Allied position in the Mediterranean, and kept open the possibility of a breakthrough that would knock Bulgaria out of the war.

Skra-di-Legen and the Preparation for 1918

The first sign that the stalemate might be broken came on 30 May 1918, when the Allies launched an offensive on the heavily fortified Skra salient, in the Battle of Skra-di-Legen. Using heavy artillery, a Franco-Greek force made a rapid push into the Bulgarian trenches, capturing Skra and the surrounding system of fortifications.

Greek casualties were estimated at about 434 to 440 killed, about 154 to 164 missing and about 1,974 to 2,220 wounded, while French losses were about 150 men killed or wounded. About 1,782 soldiers of the Central Powers became prisoners of war, and large amounts of equipment were captured.

The fall of Skra prompted the Bulgarian prime minister, Vasil Radoslavov, to resign on 21 June 1918, a sign of the political strain the war was causing in Bulgaria. The success at Skra showed that a well-prepared attack, with sufficient artillery and with Greek troops who knew the ground, could break a Bulgarian position, and it encouraged the new Allied commander-in-chief, General Louis Franchet d’Esperey, who had taken over in June 1918, to plan a larger offensive for September.

In the summer of 1918 the Allies built up supplies, brought in fresh troops, and prepared the ground for an attack on the Bulgarian centre at Dobro Pole, a mountain position that held the key to the Vardar valley and to the road north to Serbia.

The Vardar Offensive, September 1918

The Vardar offensive, fought from 15 to 29 September 1918, was the decisive battle of the Macedonian Front. At 8 a.m. on 14 September, Allied forces began a 566-gun artillery barrage on Bulgarian positions, and on 15 September a combined force of Serbian, French and Greek troops attacked the Bulgarian-held trenches at Dobro Pole.

The barrage did not cause a large number of casualties, but it severely affected Bulgarian morale, and the infantry attack broke through. On 18 September a second Allied formation assaulted the Bulgarian positions around Lake Doiran, where British and Greek troops attacked again, and although that attack failed with more than 7,000 casualties, the Serbian breakthrough at Dobro Pole could not be stopped.

The Allies advanced rapidly up the Vardar valley, and Bulgarian resistance collapsed. The parallel development of the Radomir Rebellion, a revolt by Bulgarian soldiers who refused to fight on and marched on Sofia, forced Bulgaria to seek an armistice. On 29 September the Bulgarians were granted the Armistice of Salonica by General d’Esperey.

The armistice included the full capitulation of the Bulgarian Eleventh Army, bringing the final tally of Bulgarian and German prisoners to about 77,000, and granting the Allies about 500 artillery pieces. Allied casualties in the Vardar offensive totalled about 17,295, a heavy price, but one that bought the collapse of a whole front.

The Macedonian Front was brought to an end at noon on 30 September, when the ceasefire came into effect, and Allied troops advanced into Serbia, liberating Skopje, Nis and Belgrade in the weeks that followed.

Turning Point

Dobro Pole and the Collapse of Bulgaria

The turning point of the Macedonian Front was the breakthrough at Dobro Pole on 15 September 1918. For three years the front had been a stalemate, and every Allied offensive had failed to break the Bulgarian line. Dobro Pole changed that, because it was not a local success but a breach that could not be closed.

The Bulgarian army, exhausted, poorly supplied and demoralised, could not bring up reserves in time, and the Serbian, French and Greek troops who broke through advanced so fast that the Bulgarian command lost control of its own forces. The failure of the British attack at Doiran on 18 September, costly as it was, did not matter, because the main breakthrough was already in the west, and the Bulgarian line was unravelling from the centre outwards.

The Radomir Rebellion, which broke out as the front collapsed, turned a military defeat into a political collapse, and the Bulgarian government, faced with a revolt at home and a breakthrough at the front, had no choice but to seek an armistice.

The turning point was therefore both military and political: a tactical breakthrough at a single mountain position, combined with the exhaustion of a whole army and a whole country, produced a strategic result that three years of fighting had not produced.

Bulgaria was the first Central Power to leave the war, and its surrender opened the Balkans to the Allies and put Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire in an impossible position.

Casualties and Losses

The Cost of the Front

Casualty figures for the Macedonian Front are difficult to give with precision, because the fighting lasted three years, because disease caused as many losses as combat, and because different sources count killed, wounded, missing and sick in different ways. Allied casualties over the whole front are estimated in the hundreds of thousands, including very large numbers lost to disease.

Malaria alone caused about 160,000 British casualties during the campaign, and other diseases, including dysentery and influenza, caused many more. British, French, Serbian, Greek and Italian losses in combat were also heavy, above all in the offensives of 1916, 1917 and 1918, and in the final Vardar offensive, where Allied casualties totalled about 17,295.

Serbian losses were particularly heavy, because the Serbian army had already lost more than 200,000 men in the retreat through Albania in the winter of 1915 and 1916, before the front was even established. Bulgarian and Central Powers losses are also estimated in the hundreds of thousands, with Bulgarian losses in combat and from disease running into the tens of thousands, and with about 77,000 Bulgarian and German soldiers taken prisoner in the final offensive alone.

The uncertainty of the totals is itself a reminder of the nature of the Macedonian Front: it was a long, grinding campaign in which disease and exhaustion killed as many men as bullets and shells, and in which the final collapse came not from a single battle but from the accumulation of three years of strain.

Map and Geography

A Front Defined by Mountains and Rivers

The geography of the Macedonian Front explains both its long stalemate and its sudden collapse. The front ran from the Albanian Adriatic coast in the west, through the mountains of northern Greece and southern Serbia, to the Struma River and the Gulf of Orfano on the Aegean Sea in the east, a distance of about 250 miles.

The terrain was mountainous, with peaks of several thousand feet, deep valleys and few roads, and it favoured the defence. The key positions were the mountain ridges that overlooked the Vardar valley, the road and railway that ran north from Salonica to Skopje and Belgrade, and the lake and river lines around Doiran and the Struma.

Salonica itself, the Allied base, was a large port on the Aegean, with a harbour, railways and hospitals, but it was at the southern end of a long and difficult supply line. The Vardar River, which gave the final offensive its name, runs north from Salonica through Skopje to the Danube, and it was the main axis of advance in September 1918.

The Struma Valley in the east was a low, hot, malarial plain that was almost uninhabitable in summer. The map of the Macedonian Front is therefore a map of mountains and valleys, of a single road and railway running north, and of a front line that followed the high ground.

Whoever held the high ground held the front, and when the Allies finally broke through at Dobro Pole, they broke through at the point where the high ground overlooked the road to Serbia.

Outcome and Legacy of Macedonian Front

The First Central Power to Fall

The outcome of the Macedonian Front was an Allied victory that had consequences far beyond the Balkans. Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to leave the war, signing the Armistice of Salonica on 29 September 1918. Its surrender opened the way for the liberation of Serbia, which was completed in November 1918, and it threatened Austria-Hungary from the south and the Ottoman Empire from the west.

Within weeks the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918, Austria-Hungary signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti on 3 November 1918, and Germany signed the Armistice of Compiegne on 11 November 1918, bringing the First World War to an end.

The Macedonian Front did not by itself cause those surrenders, which were the result of defeat on all fronts, but it was the first breach in the Central Powers, and it showed that a secondary theater could become decisive. The legacy of the front was mixed.

Serbia was liberated and, in December 1918, became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, but the peace settlement left many questions unresolved in the Balkans, and the region remained unstable. Greece, which had joined the Allies in 1917, gained territory, but the National Schism left a lasting division in Greek politics.

The men who served on the Macedonian Front, French, British, Serbian, Greek and others, often felt that their service was forgotten in favour of the Western Front, and the front is still less well known than the Eastern Front (World War I) or the Italian Front (World War I).

Historians now recognise, however, that the Macedonian Front, with its long stalemate and sudden breakthrough, was one of the most important theaters of the First World War, and that the Vardar offensive of September 1918 was one of the decisive operations of the war.

Commanders

Allied Commanders

General Maurice Sarrail was the first commander of the Allied Army of the Orient, from 1915 to 1917, and he established the front around Salonica, but he was criticised for his lack of success and for his difficult relations with the British and with the Greek government.

He was replaced in December 1917 by General Adolphe Guillaumat, who reorganised the force and prepared the ground for the final offensive, but who was recalled to France in June 1918. His successor, General Louis Franchet d’Esperey, commanded the Vardar offensive and accepted the Bulgarian armistice, and he is remembered as the general who finally broke the Macedonian Front.

Lieutenant General George Milne commanded the British Salonika Force for most of the war and led the British attack at Doiran in September 1918. The Serbian commanders, General Petar Bojovic and General Zivojin Misic, led the Serbian army in its return to its own country and in the breakthrough at Dobro Pole. The Greek commander, General Panagiotis Danglis, led Greek divisions in the final offensive.

The Allied command changed three times in three years, which reflected the political difficulties of the front, but the final commander, d’Esperey, had the advantage of a force that was at last united, with Greece fully in the war, and an enemy that was exhausted.

Central Powers Commanders

General Nikola Zhekov was the Bulgarian commander-in-chief for most of the war and directed the defence of the Macedonian Front, but by 1918 he was ill and unable to control the collapse of his army. General Georgi Todorov commanded Bulgarian forces on the front and fought the defensive battles of 1917 and 1918.

Field Marshal August von Mackensen, the German commander who had directed the invasion of Serbia in 1915, was the senior German officer in the Balkans, and German staff officers and artillery supported the Bulgarian defence throughout the war. The Central Powers command, like the Allied command, faced the problem of coordinating different national forces, but its main weakness in 1918 was not coordination but exhaustion.

Bulgaria, the smallest of the Central Powers, had been at war since 1915, its soldiers were poorly fed and its home front was in revolt, and Germany and Austria-Hungary, facing defeat on the Western Front and the Italian Front (World War I), could send no help.

The Bulgarian commanders who fought the final battle were therefore fighting a battle they could not win, and their surrender on 29 September 1918 was a recognition of that fact.

Related articles

• Eastern Front (World War I)
• Italian Front (World War I)
• Western Front (World War I)

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Macedonian Front?

The Macedonian Front, also called the Salonica Front, was the Allied front in northern Greece and southern Serbia during World War I. It ran from the Albanian coast to the Struma River, with Salonica as the Allied base.

When did the Macedonian Front begin and end?

It began on 21 October 1915 and ended with the Armistice of Salonica, signed on 29 September 1918. The ceasefire came into effect at noon on 30 September 1918.

Why was it called the Salonica Front?

It was named after Salonica, now Thessaloniki, the port in northern Greece where Allied troops landed in October 1915 and which served as the base for the whole campaign.

What was the Vardar offensive?

The Vardar offensive was the Allied attack of 15 to 29 September 1918. It broke the Bulgarian line at Dobro Pole, took about 77,000 prisoners, and forced Bulgaria to seek an armistice.

Why did the front remain a stalemate for so long?

The terrain favoured defence, Bulgarian mountain positions were strong, and the Allies were short of men and artillery. Disease, above all malaria, also caused very heavy losses and limited operations.

Why does the Macedonian Front matter?

Bulgaria was the first Central Power to leave the war. Its surrender opened the Balkans, led to the liberation of Serbia, and helped bring the First World War to an end within weeks.

Sources

• Macedonian front. Wikipedia. Macedonian front