This week sees something totally new for the war; not one, not two, but three Allied breakthroughs
- two of them major.
And that’s not even all that happens this week.
Basically, this week...
EVERYTHING happens.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Ottoman Army of Islam prepared for its big assault on the oil city of Baku;
The Americans, backed by the French, fought and won the Battle of St. Mihiel, they then
began the colossal task of swift redeployment to the Meuse-Argonne sector for their next
attack, and over in Russia, the British advanced on the Dvina even as the Red Terror continued
at home.
Here’s what followed.
Well, on the 14th, 3,000 Ottomans and Azeris appeared at the extreme right of the Baku
city defenses, but this was just a diversion.
Early the next morning, a huge Ottoman attack, backed by artillery, took Wolf’s Gate, but
British field artillery and six armored cars prevented them from advancing.
So the Ottomans instead began shelling the town and the harbor.
The situation deteriorated and British Commander Lionel Dunsterville began his evacuation by
the Caspian Sea.
It wasn’t just him, though, by 0600 the next day, over 8,000 Armenian troops and civilians
had also left the port.
This prompted a wave of massacres and pillaging of those remaining Armenians at the hands
of the remaining Azeri population - this was in retaliation for massacres of Azeri at Armenian
and Bolshevik hands back in March.
Some 9,000 Armenians were now killed; it had been roughly 12,000 Azeri earlier in the year.
The Ottomans entered Baku at 0500, September 16th, and the months long struggle for control
of the Baku oil was finally over.
The Ottomans had won.
But they weren’t doing so well elsewhere this week.
On the 17th on the Palestine Front, an Indian sergeant deserted from British General Edmund
Allenby’s army and went to the Ottoman lines north of Jerusalem.
He brought news that there was going to be a big British offensive beginning in two days
time on the coast.
The Turkish commanders, including Mustafa Kemal, believed him, but German General Liman
von Sanders did not and made no preparations.
Now, already on the 16th, Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab Revolt had sabotaged the railway
and blown the bridge between Amman and Daraa, which was necessary for moving around Ottoman
reinforcements, and continued railway destruction for days.
After raiding Daraa itself, they had headed for Mezerib, a major Ottoman supply depot.
From the station roof Lawrence and Hubert Young cut the telegraph link between Palestine
and Syria.
(Setting the Desert of Fire), “Liman von Sanders immediately lost contact with Damascus
and Constantinople, but the extent of the breakdown of communications was only revealed
several days later when he finally received a message from the capital.
“The telegram,” he recalled afterwards, “inquired whether I was willing to offer
a prize for a sack race in a competition in Constantinople on October 8th.”
At 0430 September 19th, the British launched their long planned offensive.
The Battle of Megiddo was named by Allenby because of its Biblical significance, its
Greek name is Armageddon.
The British advanced on 26 km front between Rafat and the Mediterranean Sea, piercing
the Ottoman lines.
The British Cavalry pushed forward east and northeast to cut off enemy retreat and 3,000
prisoners were quickly taken.
Von Sanders had in fact listened to what the deserter told him, but thought the thrust
on the coast was just a decoy attack to deceive him, so when the British advanced between
the sea and Turkish 8th army headquarters at Tulkarm, the Ottoman army was totally surprised
and just collapsed.
Later that day, once he learned that the Arabs had cut the railway north, west, and south
of Daraa, Allenby wrote to his wife, “I am beginning to think that we may have a very
great success.”
As the week ended, his men cross the field of Armageddon, closed in on Nazareth, and
entered they the Jezreel Valley.
Air power played a decisive part here.
The RAF and Royal Australian Air Force bombed the German and Ottoman wire and phone exchanges
at Nablus, Afula, and Tulkarm, which cut off all contact between von Sanders and his commanders.
They also put the main German airfield out of action and had total superiority in the
skies.
But as I said, this was not the only major Allied breakthrough this week.
The Battle of the Vardar began on the Macedonian Front on the 15th.
That day actually saw a new feature of the war- a Yugoslav Division, a Southern Slavic
aggregation of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, and Macedonians.
As they crossed the former Greco-Serbian border, they stopped the assault (Gilbert) to embrace
each other and the French soldiers fighting with them.
So...
36,000 Serbs, French, Greek, and Italians from Desperate Frankie’s Army of the Orient
went into action that day against just 12,000 Bulgarians and Germans, but the Allied artillery,
while it had destroyed the barbed wire, had not put the enemy machine guns out of action.
They were murderous, so the French used flamethrowers - seen on this front now for the first time
- to push the enemy off three mountain peaks.
This was the Battle of Dobro Pole, and by the end of the day, Bulgaria had lost over
40% of its forces there.
By the 18th, the Allies had advanced 15 km and taken over 5,000 prisoners.
On the 18th, British and Greek forces attacked at Lake Doiran.
It took two days of heavy heavy fighting for the town of Doiran to fall into allied hands.
When I say heavy, I mean HEAVY.
Like at Pip Ridge, of three British Battalions attacking Bulgarian machine gun posts, only
a third of the attackers made it back to their starting point.
So by now the Allies were advancing in the Vardar, but were stopped here, and their flanks
were theoretically exposed to an attack by the right wing of the 11th German Army.
HOWEVER... two Bulgarian regiments mutinied.
So their commander, German General Friedrich von Scholtz, who’d been a hero of the Battle
of Tannenberg four years ago, ordered his reserves commander to go with his staff officers
with their guns to stop the mutiny.
Well, when they got there it was clear that most of those Bulgarians were just not going
to fight any more, so he ordered a limited retreat.
He appealed to German High Command for reinforcements, but the only ones available was the German
brigade in Crimea, and it would take them two weeks to arrive.
So on the 20th, as the week ended, the Bulgarian army was ordered to retreat, and when the
British, French, and Greeks advanced again on places like Pip Ridge, they were deserted.
This all doesn’t sound like so much, but in actuality the Bulgarians were suddenly
in full retreat, not limited.
See, the news of a breakthrough past Dobro Pole had led the defenders at Doiran to abandon
their positions to prepare for an attack against their homeland, leaving the doorway to Hungary
open.
They had had perhaps the strongest defenses on any front of the whole war, and they were
now out of that system and morale had collapsed.
Thing is, the Allies did not yet even realize they had broken through.
They would not do so until tomorrow, the 21st.
But yet another Allied breakthrough came this week, on the Western Front.
On the 15th, British Commander Sir Douglas Haig met with Generals Henry Horne, Julian
Byng, and Henry Rawlinson at Montreuil before their next attack.
He would need total cooperation between his armies to get within striking distance of
the St. Quentin-Cambrai main defensive line.
Now Rawlinson’s 4th army, with one Corps of the 3rd army on their left and the French
1st army on their right would attack near Epehy.
So the Battle of Epehy was fought on the 18th.
The Allies overran the outer works of the Hindenburg Line, and the Germans were driven
back to their main defenses, with as many as 12,000 of them becoming POWs.
In the center, John Monash’s Australians had pretty complete success, taking all their
objectives.
Success was more limited on the flanks, but overall, it showcased that the Germans were
weakening.
Since August 8th, the British army had advanced 40 km on a front of 64 and most of that in
the past three weeks.
Compare this to the Somme two years ago when they advanced just 14km on a front of 30...
in four and a half months.
Another result of this week’s battle is that German General Georg von der Marwitz
was dismissed.
According to the Official History, it was for “the failure of his left wing on September
18th” (Generals).
Marwitz had fought the whole war, beginning with the Battle of Haelen on August 12th,
1914.
He then went to the Eastern Front and overwhelmed the Russians at the Second Battle of the Masurian
Lakes.
He then headed south and fought with the Austrians, winning the Pour le Merite way back in March
1915.
It was he who was surprised though, by the British attack at Cambrai last year, though
it was also he who got together the successful counterattack.
But just lately his morale had taken a real hit when his men lost at Peronne to the Australians
a few weeks ago.
They were desperately tired after being in the lines pretty much endlessly, and desertion
was epidemic.
He wrote in his diary that three whole battalions of an infantry regiment had “melted away”.
Well, he is now relieved of command.
Next week, he will take charge of the German 5th Army in Eastern France.
We may see him again.
And this crazy week of a crazy war comes to an end, with the Ottomans taking the oil city
of Baku, though the British have broken through in Palestine, and all the oil in the world
won’t help the Ottomans if Damascus should fall.
The Allies have broken through the Macedonian front and don’t even realize it, but they
DO know what they’re doing on the Western Front - breaking the Germans bit by bit.
Even though I like to keep things suspenseful, it would be hard to overlook or ignore by
now that things are looking grim for the Central Powers.
Three of their four major battlefronts are falling to the Allies at the same time, and
on the other one - the Italian Front- the last Austrian offensive was a catastrophic
failure.
But the war is not over yet, not by a longshot, and for it to end it will still take tens
of thousands more dead young men.
That’s the great tragedy this week - even after all this time there’s still tens of
thousands of dead young men to go.
If you want to learn more about the Bulgarian defenses at Doiran, you can click right here
for our weekly episode where we take a look at them.
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