Serbia’s bloodyminded 1914: Part III
As winter swept down through the Balkans the end was approaching for Austria-hungary’s campaign – fighting not just for wounded national pride but for the survival of the old order against a new kind of warfare. Meanwhile, for weary Serbia, defeat seemed
As winter sets in, the Austro-hungarian campaign comes to a brutal end
As October set in, bringing with it chill and cholera, the static trench warfare favoured the better-equipped men of the KUK (Kaiserlich und Königlich, Imperial and Royal Army). They could draw on field kitchens and field hospitals, entrenching tools and winter clothing, and most crucially artillery, which rumbled away at the spluttering Serbian lines. The lack of cannon left Serbian positions so hideously exposed that some trenches were moved within metres of the Habsburg lines to deter bombardment – the risk of small arms fire or raids from their near neighbours was the lesser threat compared with sitting under a waterfall of high explosives.
The cold and rain chose no side. The swollen Drina rose and flooded the Austrohungarian Fifth Army’s trenches, allowing the Serbs to carve off some of the sodden Macva bridgehead, while high in the mountains many Serbian territorials stood guard in bare feet, the cold and the damp having long disintegrated their flimsy leather opanci. The Serbian Campaign of 1914 was approaching its end, one way or another.
The cold road back
Eventually, with General Stepan ‘Stepa’ Stepanovic offering his resignation in protest at the lack of shells – a heated discussion ending with its rejection and his point made
– the Second Army was allowed to withdraw to shorten its line and mount a stronger defence. With the Serbian retreat, commander of the Austro-hungarian Balkan Army, Oskar Potiorek, finally had breathing space to plan his next move. Replenished and re-armed, the 285,000-strong KUK Balkan Army renewed its offensive on 6 November after a thunderous two-hour bombardment, forcing the weary Serbs into a fighting retreat so severe that, in an urgent summit on 8 November, Serbian Chief-of-staff Radomir Putnik suggested negotiating for peace.
As a chunk of western Serbia fell to the Fifth and Sixth Army invasion, France was urgently petitioned for arms to keep its Balkan partner fighting. France caved. Shells would be sent overland via Greece, but that would take time.
Fear of Austro-hungarian reprisal saw the civilian population flee the occupied west with the army, slowing the retreat into a quagmire as thick as the roads. Men recruited from those villages (most of them with the Third
Army) deserted to rejoin their families, causing the already pitiful Serbian morale to sink even further into the mud. Between 28 October and 13 November some 63,017 men left their posts.
Deaf to the mood, King Petar I called Putnik to make him aware of his intentions to visit the front on 9 November and see the war for himself. Putnik replied with alarming frankness: “You cannot visit the front your highness... because there you will hear that the soldiers curse you, [Prime Minister] Pašic, and me.”
An officer of the Morava I division observed, “We know we have no artillery ammunition, and we know that every position is temporary, and that an order for withdrawal will come quickly. Exhaustion is great among us all, because we march by night and fortify positions by day.” The First, Second and Third Armies took up new positions on the right flank of the Ljib and Kolubara rivers on 11 November. Train tracks, roads, bridges, telegraph and telephone lines were pulled down or torn up in their wake, and livestock was requisitioned, to deny the invaders any advantage. The next day snow began to fall, slowing the progress
“EXHAUSTION IS GREAT AMONG US ALL, BECAUSE WE MARCH BY NIGHT AND FORTIFY POSITIONS BY DAY”
of the Fifth and Sixth Army as roads became indistinguishable from the slurry.
It was a vast front, stretching from the mouth of the Kolubara, where it met the Danube and Sava east of Belgrade, to the slopes of Suvobor and Malje in the centre of the country.
The 19,000-strong Defence of Belgrade held the rightmost flank of the Serbian lines with 47 cannon. Then came Stepanovic’s Second Army, now numbering 67,000 men and 138 cannon. In the centre was General Pavle Jurišic-šturm’s Third Army, numbering 53,000 and 80 cannon, while the First Army fought from the mountains with 44,000 men and 80 cannon. Further south, the territorial Užice Army of 25,000 men and 55 cannon protected the First’s flank, relying more on geography than force of arms. With numbers now severely depleted, it was approximately one man for every metre of the front.
On 14 November General Petar Bojovic – whose wound from Srem had failed to heal, leaving him incapacitated and unable to command – was replaced by General Živojin Mišic as commander of the First Army. Like his peers at the head of the Second and Third Armies, Mišic had led men in the Serbo-turkish Wars of 1876-78 and Serbo-bulgarian War of 1885. As Putnik’s aide in the First Balkan War (1912-13) and Second Balkan War (1913), he could also draw on an understanding of the broad sweeps of strategy. Mišic’s balance of big picture and battlefield nous would serve Serbia well in the Battle of Kolubara.
The beginning of the end
In 1804, the town of Valjevo on the west bank of the Kolubara sparked the First Serbian Uprising against Ottoman rule. Knezes (Dukes) Ilija Bircanin and Aleksa Nenadovic were decapitated for conspiring against the sultan and their heads were put on display. More deaths would follow Bircanin and Nenadovic. The ‘Slaughter of the Knezes’ triggered a nine-year insurgency against Serbia’s Turkish occupiers. On 16 November the XV Corps entered the deserted streets of Valjevo, while the rest of the Sixth Army reached the Kolubara River to claim scalps of their own. It’s unlikely the Austro-hungarians gave the history of this land the slightest consideration, but if they did they might have pondered the character of a people able to derive so much purpose from suffering, able to fight for so long and with such futility against impossible odds, and to die so willingly for the dream of Serbia.
Using the elite mountain troops of the XV and XVI Corps, the Sixth Army was tasked to force the Kolubara, push the Serbs from the high ground and take the strategically vital railway beyond. The river was high with melted snow, and the banks had burst to flood the fields either side. With the Kolubara as their moat, the Rudnik mountains were the densely forested ramparts from which Serbia’s First Army dug in, holding the KUK for a few days before withdrawing on the night of 21-22 November to the Suvobor ridge. To General Mišic’s mind this was the ideal redoubt for a counterattack to regain their recently vacated lines, but a disastrous attempt by Maljen detachment cost them so dearly that the First Army was forced to withdraw, lest its depleted manpower leave the whole front vulnerable.
On 23 November the weather worsened, muffling operations along the entire line. Mountain streams became raging torrents, snow drifts blocked roads, and newly dug trenches filled with mud and water as quickly as they were excavated. For five days fires