Balkans Campaign (World War I)
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The Balkans Campaign of World War I was fought between Serbia (and later Romania and Greece, who sided with the Allied Powers) and the Central Powers, mostly Austria-Hungary and Germany as well as Bulgaria.
Overview
The prime cause of World War I being the hostility between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, it is hardly surprising that some of the earliest fighting took place between Serbia and its powerful neighbour to the north: Austria-Hungary. Serbia held out against Austria-Hungary for more than a year before it was conquered in late 1915.
Allied diplomacy was able to bring Romania into the war in 1916 but this proved disastrous for the Romanians. Shortly after they joined the war, a combined German, Austrian, Bulgarian and Ottoman offensive conquered their country in a rapid campaign which ended in December of 1916.
In 1917, Greece entered the war on the Allied side, and in 1918, the multi-national Army of the Orient, based in northern Greece, finally launched an offensive which drove Bulgaria to seek peace, recaptured Serbia and finally halted only at the border of Hungary in November 1918.
Serbian Campaign
The Serbian army was able to fight off the larger army of Austria-Hungary thanks, in large part, to the fact that the Austrians had to focus their attention on fighting off the huge Russian army. That said, the Serbians fought very well and inflicted humiliating defeats on Austria armies in 1914.
In 1915 the Austrians gained military support from Germany and, with diplomacy, brought in Bulgaria as an ally. Serbian forces were attacked from both the north and the south and were forced to retreat. The retreat was skillfully carried out and the Serbian army remained operational, even though it was now based in Greece. The front stabilised roughly around the Greek border, through the intervention of a Franco-British-Italian force which had landed in Salonica.
In 1918, after a prolonged build-up, the Allies, under the energetic French General, Franchet d'Esperey leading a combined French, Serbian, Greek and British army, attacked out of Greece. His initial victories convinced the Bulgarian government to sue for peace. He then attacked north and defeated the German and Austrian forces that tried to halt his offensive. By October 1918 his army had recaptured all of Serbia and was preparing to invade Hungary proper. The offensive halted only because the Hungarian leadership offered to surrender in November 1918.
Romanian Campaign
Romania before the war was an ally of Austria-Hungary but, like Italy, refused to join the war when it started. The Romanian government finally chose to side with the Allies in August 1916, the main reason being Transylvania. The war was a total disaster for Romania. Before the year was out, the Germans (with some Austrian, Bulgarian and Ottoman divisions) had conquered Wallachia and Dobruja – and captured more than half of its army as POWs[[Citing sources citation needed]].
In 1917, re-trained (mainly by a French expeditionary corps under the command of General Henri Berthelot) and re-supplied, the Romanian Army, together with a desintegrating Russian Army, were successful in containing the German advance into Moldavia.
In May 1918, after the German advance in Ukraine and Russia signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Romania, surrounded by the Central Powers forces, had no other choice but to sue for peace (see Treaty of Bucharest, 1918).
After the successful offensive on the Thessaloniki front which knocked Bulgaria out of the war, Romania re-entered the war on November 10, 1918.
Results
While the Allies hoped that the addition of Greece and Romania to their side would increase their strength against the Central Powers, in actual fact, both the Greeks and the Romanians cost the Allies extra, in terms of men and materials that had to be suppiled in order to save them from destruction by the German, Austria, and Bulgarian armies.
The Russians had to pour extra divisions and supplies to keep the Romanian army from being utterly destroyed. According the John Keegan, the Russian Chief of Staff, General Alekseev was very dismissive of the Romanian army and argued that they would drain, rather than add to the Russian reserves (John Keegan, World War I, pg 307). Alekseev was proved correct in his analysis.
The French and British kept six divisions each on the Greek frontier from 1916 till the end of 1918. Originally, the French and British went to Greece to help Serbia, but with Serbia's conquest in the fall of 1915, their continued presence was pointless. For nearly three years, these divisions accomplished essentially nothing and only tied down half of the Bulgarian army, which wasn't going to go far from Bulgaria in any event.
In fact, Keegan argues that "the installation of a violently nationalist and anti-Turkish government in Athens, led to Greek mobilization in the cause of the "Great Idea" - the recovery of the Greek empire in the east - which would complicate the Allied effort to resettle the peace of Europe for years after the war ended." (Keegan pg. 308).
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