Second Balkan War (the whole story)
Background - The First Balkan War
During the First Balkan War, the Balkan League, composed of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria, had succeeded in conquering the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire (Albania, Macedonia, the Sandak and Thrace), leaving the Ottomans with only the Chataldja and Gallipoli peninsulas. The Treaty of London, signed on 30 May 1913, which ended the war, acknowledged the Balkan states' gains west of the Enos-Medea line on an uti possedetis basis, and created an independent Albania.
However, the relations between the victorious Balkan allies became quickly strained over the division of the spoils, especially Macedonia. During the negotiations that had led to the establishment of the Balkan League, Serbia and Bulgaria signed a secret agreement on 13 March 1912 which determined their future boundaries, in effect sharing Macedonia between them along the Kriva PalankaOhrid line (with both cities going to the Bulgarians). This left the bulk of Macedonia in Bulgarian hands. In case of a post-war disagreement, the northern part of Macedonia had been assigned as "disputed zone" under Russian arbitration and the southern part under Bulgarian control. Bulgaria's policy was to use the agreement to limit Serbia's access to Macedonia, while at the same time denying any such agreement with Greece, believing that its army would be able to occupy the larger part of Macedonia and the important port city of Thessalonica before the Greeks. In the event, during the war, the Serbs succeeded in capturing an area far south to the agreed border, down to the MonastirGevgelija line (both in Serbian hands). At the same time, the Greeks were able to advance north, occupying Thessalonica shortly before the Bulgarians arrived, and establishing a common border with the Serbs.
When Bulgaria called upon Serbia to honor their prewar agreement over northern Macedonia, the Serbs, displeased at being forced from the Great Powers to evacuate Albania, adamantly refused to give up any more territory. Very soon, minor clashes broke out along the borders of the occupation zones between the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Greeks. Responding to the perceived Bulgarian threat, Serbia started negotiations with Greece, which also had reasons to be concerned about Bulgarian intentions. Only a few years before, Greeks and Bulgarians had fought a vicious guerrilla war in the area, and a Bulgarian regiment, which had been allowed to enter Thessalonica eight months before, ostensibly for recuperation, had remained there ever since.
On 19 May/1 June 1913, a day before the Treaty of London was signed and just 16 days before the Bulgarian attack, a secret Serbian-Greek military protocol was signed, confirming the current demarcation line between the two occupation zones as their mutual border and concluding an alliance in case of an attack from Bulgaria or Austria-Hungary. During the negotiations Serbia preferred not to explain the roots of its dispute with Bulgaria, failing to notify the Greeks about their prewar settlements with Bulgaria over Macedonia. With this agreement, Serbia succeeded in making Greece a part of its dispute over northern Macedonia, since Greece had guaranteed Serbia's current (and officially disputed) occupation zone in Macedonia.[2] Bulgarian diplomacy, under Prime Minister Geshov, in an attempt to halt the Serbo-Greek rapprochement, signed a protocol with Greece on 21 May agreeing on a permanent demarcation line between their respective forces, in effect unofficially accepting Greek's control over southern Macedonia. But his later dismissal ended his Serbia-targeting diplomacy.
Another point of friction was Bulgaria's refusal to cede the fortress of Silistra to Romania as promised before the war in exchange for Romanian neutrality. When Romania demanded its cession, Bulgaria's foreign minister offered instead some minor border changes, which excluded Silistra, and assurances for the rights of the Kutzovlachs in Macedonia. Romania threatened to occupy the promised territory by force, but a Russian proposal for arbitration prevented hostilities. In the resulting Protocol of St. Petersburg of 7 May 1913, Bulgaria agreed to give the area, only to refuse again a little later, making a conflict between the two countries inevitable.
Going to war - Bulgarian plans
In 1912 Bulgaria's national aspiration, as this had been expressed through the King Ferdinand and the military leadership around him, exceeded the provisions of what was considered in 1878 as maximalistic, Treaty of San Stefano, since it included both Eastern and Western Thrace and all Macedonia with Thessalonica, Adrianople and Constantinople[3]. An early evidence of the lack of realistic thinking in Bulgarian leadership was that although Russia had sent clear warnings expressed for the first time in 5 November 1912 (well before the first battle of Chataldja) that if Bulgarian Army occupied Constantinople they will attack it, they continued and tried to take the city.
Although Bulgarian Army succeeded in capturing Adrianople (with the help of the Serbian Army), King Ferdinand's ambition in crowning himself an Emperor in Constantinople proved also unrealistic when Bulgarian Army failed to capture the city in the battle of Chataldja. Even worse, the effort in capturing the Thrace and Constantinople ultimately caused the loss of the major part of Macedonia including Thessalonica and that could not be easily accepted, leading the Bulgarian military leadership around King Ferdinand to decide upon a war against its former allies. However, with the Ottomans unwilling to definitely accept the loss of Thrace in the east, and an enraged Romania on the north, the decision to open a war against both Greece (to the south) and Serbia (to the west), was a rather adventurous one, since:
In May the Turks had urgently requested a German mission to reorganize the Ottoman army. By mid June Bulgaria became aware of the agreement between Serbia and Greece in case of a Bulgarian attack. In 27 June Montenegro announced that it will side with Serbia in the event of a Serbian-Bulgarian war and in 28 June Romania officially warned Bulgaria that it will not remain neutral in a new Balkan war.[2]
As skirmishing continued in Macedonia, mainly between Serbian and Bulgarian troops, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia tried to stop the upcoming conflict, since Russia didn't wish to lose either of its Slavic allies in the Balkans. On 8 June, he sent an identical personal message to the Kings of Bulgaria and Serbia, offering to act as arbitrator according to the provisions of the 1912 Serbo-Bulgarian treaty. Serbia was asking for a revision of the original treaty, since it had already lost north Albania due to the Great Powers' decision to establish the state of Albania, an area that had been recognized as a Serbian territory of expansion under the prewar Serbo-Bulgarian treaty, in exchange of the Bulgarian territory of expansion in northern Macedonia. Bulgaria, by making now the acceptance of Russian arbitration possible only if the treaty remained unchanged in effect denied any discussion, caused Russia to angrily repudiate its alliance with Bulgaria. Sazonov's exact words to Danev were "Do not expect anything from us and forget the existence of any of our agreements from 1902 until present"[1] (see Russo-Bulgarian treaty of alliance of 1902). Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was already angry with Bulgaria because of the later's denial to honor its recently signed agreement with Romania over Silistra succeeded also after Russian arbitration. Then Serbia and Greece proposed that each of the three countries reduce its army by one fourth, as a first step to facilitate a peaceful solution, but Bulgaria rejected it.
Bulgaria was already on the track to the war, since a new cabinet had been formed in Bulgaria where the pacifist M. Geshov was replaced by the hardliner and head of a russophil party Dr. Danev as premier. There is some evidence that to overcome King Ferdinand's reservations over a new war against Serbia and Greece, certain personalities in Sofia threatened to overthrow him. In any case on 16 June, the Bulgarian high command, under the direct control of King Ferdinand and without notifying the government, ordered Bulgarian troops to start a surprising attack simultaneously against both the Serbian and Greek positions, without declaring war and to dismiss any to the contrary orders. On the next day the government put a pressure on the General Staff to order the army to cease hostilities which caused confusion and loss of initiative but this act was otherwise in vain. In response King Ferdinand dismissed General Savov and replaced him with General Dimitriev as the commander-in-chief.
Bulgaria's intention was to defeat Serbs and Greeks and to occupy as more as possible areas before the Great Powers interfere to stop the hostilities. In order to provide the necessary superiority in arms, the entire Bulgarian army was committed to these operations. No provisions were taken in case of an (officially declared) Romanian intervention or an Ottoman counterattack, strangely assuming that Russia will assure that no attack will come from those directions[4], although on 9 June, Russia had angrily repudiated its Bulgarian alliance and shifted its diplomacy towards Romania (Russia already had named Romania's King Carol an honorary Russian Field Marshal, as a clear warning in shifting its policy to Sofia on December 1912)[2]. The plan was for a concentrated attack against the Serbian army across the Vardar plain to neutralize it and to capture north Macedonia, together with a less concentrated one against the Greek Army near Thessalonica, which had approximately half the size of the Serbian in order to capture the city and south Macedonia. Bulgarian high command was not sure whether their forces were enough to defeat the Greek Army, but they thought them enough for defending the south front as a worst case scenario, until the arrival of additional forces after defeating the Serbian Army to the north.
Opposing forces
Unlike most other armies of Europe, the Bulgarian Army had a very heavy, almost misleading organization, since every division had 3 brigades of 2 regiments, composed of 4 battalions of 6 heavy companies of 250 or more men each, plus an independent battalion, 2 large artillery regiments and one cavalry regiment, giving a grand total of 25 very heavy infantry battalions and 16 cavalry companies per division,[5] which was more than the equivalent of six nine-battalion divisions, the standard divisional structure in most contemporary armies, as was also the case with the Greek and Serbian armies in 1913. Consequently, although the Bulgarian Army had a total of 600,000 men mobilized in the beginning of the First Balkan War, there were only 9 organizational divisions, giving a divisional strength closer to an Army than to a Division. Tactical necessities during and after the First Balkan War modified this original structure: a new 10th division was formed using two brigades from the 1st and 6th divisions, and an additional three independent brigades were formed from new recruits. Nevertheless, the heavy structure generally remained. By contrast, the Greek Army of Macedonia had also 9 Divisions but the total number of men under arms was only 118,000. Another decisive factor affecting the real strength of the divisions between the opposing armies was the distribution of artillery. The nine division-strong Greek Army had a total of 176 guns and the ten division-strong Serbian Army, 230. The Bulgarians had 1,116, a ratio of 6:1 against the Greeks and 5:1 against the Serbian Army.
There is a dispute over the strength of the Bulgarian Army during the Second Balkan War. At the outbreak of the First Balkan War, Bulgaria mobilized a total of 599,878 men. The non-recoverable casualties during the First Balkan War were 33,000 men (14,000 killed and 19,000 died of disease). To replace these casualties Bulgaria conscripted 60,000 men between the two wars, mainly from the newly occupied areas, using 21,000 of them to form the Seres, Drama and Odrin independent brigades. It is known that there were no demobilized units. According to the Bulgarian command the Army had 7,693 officers and 492,528 soldiers in its ranks on the 16th of June (including the above mentioned three brigades).[6] This gives a difference of 99,657 men in strength between the two wars. In comparison, subtracting the actual number of casualties including wounded and adding the newly conscripted men produces a total of no less than 576,878 men. The army was experiencing shortages of war materials and had only 378,998 rifles at its disposal. The 1st and 5th armies (under Generals Vasil Kutinchev and Stefan Toshev respectively) were deployed along the old Serbian-Bulgarian borders, with the 3rd Army under General Radko Dimitriev around Kyustendil, and the 4th Army under Stilian Kovachev in the Koani-Radovi area. The 2nd Army under General Nikola Ivanov was detailed against the Greek army.
The army of the Kingdom of Serbia accounted for 348,000 men (out of which 252,000 were combatants)[1] divided into three armies with 10 divisions. Its main force was deployed on the Macedonian front along the Vardar river and near Skopje. Its nominal commander-in-chief was King Peter I, with Radomir Putnik as his chief of staff and effective field commander.
By early June, the army of the Kingdom of Greece had a grand total of some 142,000 armed men with nine infantry divisions and one cavalry brigade. The bulk of the army with 8 divisions (117,861 men) was gathered in Macedonia, positioned in an arc north, northeastern of Thessalonica while one division and independent units (24,416 men) were left in Epirus. With the outbreak of hostilities, the 8th division (stationed in Epirus) was transferred to the front, and with the arrival of new recruits, the army's strength in the Macedonian theater increased eventually to some 145,000 men with 176 guns. King Constantine I assumed command of the Greek forces, with Lt. General Viktor Dousmanis as his chief of staff but as in the First Balkan War the organizational and strategic mind behind the scene was Major (later Lieutenant General) Ioannis Metaxas.
The Kingdom of Montenegro sent one division of 12,000 men under General Janko Vukoti to the Serbian-Macedonian front.
The Kingdom of Romania mobilized over 330,000 men, allocated in five corps. 80,000 of them were assembled to occupy the Southern Dobrudja, while an army of 250,000 was assembled to carry the main offensive into Bulgaria.[1]
***The only thing needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing***
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